Modelling Science

The analysis of high-frequency log files of a massive multiplayer online game currently played by thousands of users allows to assess socio-economical dynamics over the past three years. We are able to relate social and economic behavior of the players to a series of stylized facts known to exist in the real world. In particular, we analyze the evolution of social friendship and enemy networks, private message communication networks, and measure their characteristic properties. Our data confirm the recently observed phenomena of shrinking diameters and growing average degrees. Clustering coefficients of friend-networks decay in time, while those of foes grow. A motif analysis displays further striking differences in topological structure between friend and foe networks. We compare our findings with literature on real-world data. With this setup we try to establish a 'laboratory' of economical behaviour.