Chang Kai Joshua Lee

Plato once said, "You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." Forty-four percent of the Internet-using population play some form of an online game; that is about 700 million people across the world. What do people do in online games? Whom do they meet, and whom do they talk to? What motivates them to become so deeply invested in these shared virtual environments? This visualization investigates player interactions in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Aion. Three players were randomly assigned to have their gameplay interactions visualized through three critical lenses: in-game money transactions, private messages, and skills and damage.