Petabytes of Lost History
World of Warcraft has more than 100 million registered players, Minecraft has sold more than 300 million copies, and EVE Online runs the largest economic simulator with thousands of players participating in complex financial and political interactions.
These games generate petabytes of data on social behavior, community evolution, and emergent cultural and economic phenomena. Unfortunately, most of this invaluable knowledge about human behavior in digital environments is lost because there are no effective ways to preserve and analyze it.
VectorDiff as a Chronicler of Digital Civilizations
VectorDiff can become a „chronicler of digital civilizations,” preserving the complete stories of the evolution of virtual communities. Each player, guild, city, or country in the game becomes an object with its social biography.
An example from EVE Online: When a major corporate war breaks out in the game, involving thousands of players and lasting for months, VectorDiff can preserve the full story of that conflict – from the first political tensions, through strategic alliances, major battles, acts of sabotage, to the final resolution and its long-term consequences.
New Era of Social Research
Human behavior laboratory: Games could become the largest social research laboratory in history, with millions of people participating in controlled social experiments.
Behavioral economics: Analyzing the semantic histories of economic behavior in games can provide new insights into the mechanisms of real-world economics.
Emergent social phenomena: Researchers can observe how cults, languages, traditions, and institutions emerge and evolve in digital environments.
Commercial stories: Players can buy and sell unique stories – complete chronicles of great wars, the first explorations of new continents, or the building of powerful empires.
