Abstract

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) bring together millions of players in shared online worlds. The games industry eclipsed film by revenue in the mid ‘90s. These huge financial opportunities introduced incentives both for developers to instrument their games to better understand player behaviour, and for malicious parties to exploit these online games for their own personal gain. Jagex launched RuneScape, their flagship MMO , in 2001. RuneScape players inhabit a virtual world in which they socialise, work, trade, and fight—a microcosm of human behaviour. Through near-weekly updates adding new features and game content, it has cemented itself as a long-lived and immensely popular game. This talk describes the data collection and analysis that maintains the feedback loop between these regular updates and the player-base, allowing game developers to delight their users, as well as the tools for identifying bad in-game actors. We will describe how modern games are instrumented, and then cover three main topics: preventing cheating, advertising, and in-game economics. Finally, we will discuss how to model ‘emergent behaviours’ as game players learn more about the game world they inhabit. No prior knowledge of the games industry is expected.