Social Sciences

[Pilot 901]

We all know that DU is a game based on it's community, which is supposed to build civilizations : cities, politics, economy etc ... Players will act according to their personal feelings and by their own means to reach their goals.

What i was wondering about, is that it could be a very good experiment to observe all the different behaviors player could have (builders, traders, warriors, diplomats ...) and their interactions, like a huge mini-world with potentially thousands of guinea pigs (us ^^') !

This kind of stuff happened in WOW when a bug just spread a contagious virus in the game that created a real plague situation (The Corrupted Blood incident), and it has been a really interesting event for people who were looking to analyze player's behavior (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident#Models_for_real-world_research).

To me, DU is an opportunity for social scientists to look for similar situations.

 

[Abatos]

You're more than welcome to do so. I'm also quite interested in observing how the world grows and evolves as time goes forward.

[0ozymandias]

If you're proposing some sort of space-plague, then I want Necromorphs.

[plmkoi]

I am skeptical that people would get much when it comes to research in the social sciences utilizing DU, the main issue being the anonymity that players can hide behind. But I can say that recording the historical events of player politics might be thorough this time unlike Eve. It is a pity as a lot of the history in Eve is pretty much lost and I would compare it to basically the ancient times of the Bronze Age with a lot of info/drama being on the forums and a lot of them being shut down (scrapheap challenge).