On Terra Nova, there is an ongoing grumble from many posters that there is an imbalance towards Second Life in the postings that are made. There is another suspicion - sometimes mentioned by way of rebuttal to the SL conspiracy theory - that World of Warcraft gets all the authorial love. Greg Lastowka addressed this explicitly in a recent post.
So what I did was rip every TN article since the beginning of June, using a piece of code that I wrote to extract oil-sector data from the EIA site. By a happy coincidence, this came to exactly 100 articles. I then wrote a script to parse the retrieved texts for expressions such as "Second Life", "SL", "Warcraft", "WoW" and the like. I flagged every occurrence and manually checked it to avoid false positives from posts by those such as Dmitri Williams who occasionally use "wow" as an exclamation. I also skimmed the articles to pick up references less amenable to automated detection.
For each article, I collected title, author and a count for three games: World of Warcraft, Second Life and Eve-Online. The latter I chose to provide a baseline: it is a well-populated virtual world/game, with many interesting and complex factors, which is amenable to study and discussion. I suspected that it would provide a useful comparison.
Meta-references and purely allusive references that did not substantively refer to an actual game were not counted: thus the mere mention of thorium, amongst a variety of other currencies, in an article that did not go on to mention or discuss World of Warcraft, was not counted. Such examples were rare ("Born with Silver|Gold|Mithril|Thorium spoons in their mouths" and "How will "free-to-play" business models affect the gaming landscape in the West?" provide an example of passing and allusive references respectively).
For the 100 articles sampled, each game received mentions in the following percentage of articles:
World of Warcraft 29%
Second Life 20%
Eve-Online 6%
This is interesting. Second Life is referenced only 68% as often as World of Warcraft. This may seem disproportionate in terms of market share, but it is arguable that Second Life contains more experimental aspects amenable to discussion. Second Life receiving mentions in only one article out of every five is clearly enough to provoke interest from those who already suspect bias, especially when compared to a 6% rate for Eve-Online, which looks under-represented considering the complex and emergent gameplay possible therein. But the focus is clearly more squarely upon World of Warcraft.
Another interesting comparison is to split the data in half.
For the latest fifty posts in the sample:
World of Warcraft 40%
Second Life 14%
Eve-Online 8%
For the earlier fifty posts:
World of Warcraft 18%
Second Life 26%
Eve-Online 4%
Thus, World of Warcraft has more than doubled its rate of reference, whereas Second Life has almost halfed. Given that there have been no major additions to gameplay in World of Warcraft over this period, nor any substantial reductions from the complexity of Second Life, could this reflect caution in reaction to the perceived bias asserted by non-authorial posters?
I picked out a few other interesting points of data, but lack of funding (the end of lunchtime) prevented further detailed analysis. In highlight, however:
- Only 6% of posts referenced both WoW and Second Life. There seems to be a split here between articles interested in gamey worlds and those interested in worldy ones. Greg was the most likely person to reference both, and also the most balanced author of the frequent posters, referring to each in 33% of his 12 posts.
- Articles which made references to World of Warcraft were likely to be about broader issues, with WoW no more than a passing reference. Articles which referred to Second Life were more likely to be specifically about Second Life.
- Edward Castranova has been very careful not to provoke his audience.
- Nate Combs receives the Red Thorium Banner Award for Stakhanovite Posting, contributing a sample-skewing 27% of articles over the period studied. He is also the least likely to mention SL of the regular posters (3.7%), and the most likely to mention Eve (66% of all mentions of Eve-Online were by Nate).