Natalia Velez - Games as a window into large-scale social phenomena - IPAM at UCLA

Recorded 27 September 2024. Natalia Velez of Princeton University presents "Games as a window into large-scale social phenomena" at IPAM's Analyzing High-dimensional Traces of Intelligent Behavior Workshop.
Abstract: Communities create conditions that drive the creation of new technologies. But why do some communities thrive while others stagnate? In this talk, I will present work analyzing player behavior in One Hour One Life, a multiplayer online game where players can build technologically complex settlements entirely from scratch (N = 22,011 players, 2,700 communities, 428,255 lives lived, 127,768,267 social interactions detected). This dataset provides a unique opportunity to test how community dynamics shape technological development in an open-ended world: Players can form communities that endure for many generations, and they can combine thousands of unique materials to build vast technological repertoires. In Study 1, we study how technological development is shaped by individual expertise and community-wide dynamics. We find that-in order to grow and survive-communities have to navigate a delicate balance between diversifying to develop new technologies, and specializing to maintain the tools and resources they already have. In Study 2, we test the scaling properties of the settlements that players have built in One Hour One Life. We find that these settlements exhibit scaling properties that are strikingly similar to real-world cities, which enables us to leverage this dataset to test longstanding conjectures about how humans made the transition to living in cities. Our work provides a testbed to study large-scale social phenomena that would otherwise be difficult to study using traditional methods.
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