网游也可以当研究工具
英语课
Many online social networking tools have fulfilled uses their creators had never dreamed of. Twitter started as a way to tell others what you were doing, and then surprisingly, turned into a tool to find gas during the Atlanta gas crunch 1 last year.
Now online video games, called MMORPGs (massive multiplayer online role-playing games)—are providing enormous amounts of data for social scientists studying human behavior.
A 20-person research group has started to analyze 2 three years of online data culled 3 from Sony’s popular fantasy game, EverQuest II. They have 60 terabytes of information detailing the actions of 300,000 players, most of whom are 31 years of age, a lot women, surprisingly, and play an average 26 hours per week.
Preliminary findings include: the game economy mirrors the real-world economy. Trust among the players is stronger than trust for general strangers online, proving that players consider it a community.
There are now 45 million people playing MMORPGs and the researchers intend to prove new hypotheses in real-life group dynamics 4, conversation, conflict and learning by quantifying the online-life within these games.
So all those hours spent online networking is proving useful to a greater cause: the study of ourselves. Game on.
把网游作为研究工具
许多网络社交工具实现了他们的创造者当初从来就没有梦想的功能。“Twitter”在开始阶段的作用是给其他人发送即时信息,告诉他们你正在干些什么。非常令人吃惊地是后来 “Twitter”在去年亚特兰大闹煤气荒期间转变成为寻找煤气的一种工具。
现在名为MMORPGs(大型多人在线角色扮演游戏)的网络游戏为社会科学家们研究人类行为提供了大量的数据。
一个由20人组成的研究小组已经开始分析从《无尽的任务2》(EverQuest II)中所采集来的3年在线数据,这款流行的奇幻网络游戏是索尼公司开发的。研究者们拥有60兆节的信息数据,这些数据详细给出了30万个玩家的活动情况,他们平均每周玩26个小时的游戏,其中大部分的玩家的年龄在31岁,令人吃惊的是,玩家中有许多的女性。
前期的研究结果包括:游戏的经济情况反映了现实世界的经济情况。玩家之间的信任程度要高于网络中普通陌生人之间的信任程度,这证明玩家们把这种网络游戏看成一个社区。
目前有4500万人在玩MMORPGs,这些研究者们想通过对这些游戏里的虚拟生活(online-life)的量化研究来证明现实生活(real-life)中的假说,这些假说包括群体动力学、交谈、冲突以及学习。
所以,所有花在网络社交的那些时间对于一项更伟大的事业——研究我们人类自身——正在证明其有用性。接着玩吧!
n.关键时刻;艰难局面;v.发出碎裂声
- If it comes to the crunch they'll support us.关键时刻他们是会支持我们的。
- People who crunch nuts at the movies can be very annoying.看电影时嘎吱作声地嚼干果的人会使人十分讨厌。
vt.分析,解析 (=analyse)
- We should analyze the cause and effect of this event.我们应该分析这场事变的因果。
- The teacher tried to analyze the cause of our failure.老师设法分析我们失败的原因。
v.挑选,剔除( cull的过去式和过去分词 )
- The herd must be culled. 必须有选择地杀掉部分牧畜。 来自辞典例句
- The facts were culled from various sources. 这些事实是从各方收集到的。 来自辞典例句
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