Rise and Fall of Online Game Groups: Common Findings on Two Different Games

Among many types of online games, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) provide players with the most realistic gaming experience inspired by the real, offline world. In particular, much stress is put upon socializing and collaboration with others as a condition for one’s success, just as in real life. An advantage of studying MMORPGs is that since all actions are recorded, we can observe phenomena that are hard to observe in real life. For instance, we could observe how the allimportant collaboration between people come into being, evolve, and eventually die out from the data to gain valuable insights to the group dynamics. In this paper, we analyzed the successes and failures of the online game groups in two different MMORPG, ArcheAge of XLGames, Inc. and Aion of NCsoft, Inc.. We find that there exist factors that influence the dynamics of group growth common to the games regardless of the games’ maturity.