BeXplorer: Visual analytics of dynamic interplay between communication and purchase behaviors in MMORPGs

With the rapid development of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), a huge amount of fine-grained data on the in-game activities of players have been recorded by MMORPGs operators. These data provide considerable opportunities with which to study the dynamic interplay between player behaviors and investigate the roles of various social structures that underlie such interplay. However, it is challenging to model and visualize these behavioral data. This study proposes a novel influence-susceptible model to measure the dynamic interplay between behaviors. Based on this model, we introduce a new visual analytics system called BeXplorer. This system enables analysts to interactively explore the dynamic interplay between player purchase and communication behaviors and to examine the manner in which this interplay is bound by social structures where players are embedded. Three case studies and a task-based evaluation are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our method.