Asherons Call: Independent MMORPG/AC Survey

The Institute for Creative Technologies is conducting a study on the social networks that develop within Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Asheron's Call was chosen to be the first game studied. The study is called Social Network Analysis of Asheron's Call (SNAAC). The information gained will help game developers understand and better support the emergence of social networks.

We are looking to collect data through a Decal plug-in. While running the plug-in whenever you send an @tell, @reply @fellowship or any other message command it makes a note of who sent the message to who and when it was sent. The SNAAC plug-in does not log the contents of what you are talking about. For your privacy, there is an option to disable logging if you so desire. Also, the log files are plain text which you may examine with any editor.

After you accumulate several log files we ask that you submit them to us via our web site. You will be asked to enter your email address, select the file you wish to submit, and click 'Send.' This process is simple and painless.

Before downloading the plug-in, we ask that participants fill out a short survey. We encourage other Asheron's Call players who decide not to run the SNAAC plug-in to fill out the survey.

You can learn more about SNAAC and download the plug-in at our website: http://www.ict.usc.edu/~snaac/

You can learn more about the Institute for Creative Technologies at our website: http://www.ict.usc.edu

Thank you for participating in the SNAAC survey!

-Charlie Varner

Institute for Creative Technologies

varner@ict.usc.edu