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"Massively multiplayer online worlds (e.g., EverQuest or SecondLife) constitute a new form of social life that is ripe for social scientific study. Inhabitants of persistent virtual environments spend on average more than twenty hours per week logged on."

"I've spent much of the last year collecting and helping to analyze data scraped from World of Warcraft as part of the largest quantitative study of virtual worlds to date."

"For the past 8 months, we have been collecting and analyzing data from WoW. We use "bots" on 5 different servers (covering PvP, PvE and RP realms) and take snapshots of the population every 10 minutes or so (more detail here), capturing data about each present character's level, location, grouped status, and guild affiliation (among other things). So far, we have observed about 150,000 unique characters. While this data is far from perfect (after all, we are only getting what Blizzard is willing to let transpire through their API), it can still yield a surprising amount of insight into the social dimensions of multiplayer games."