If you’re interested at all in the social aspect of MMOGs, I hope you’re already reading PlayOn. The blog there displays occasional data dumps from a team of researchings working away in the belly of World of Warcraft. Erik Nickell has put up a short run-down of some of their methods and findings over on Terra Nova.

From the piece:

World of Warcraft is not PlayOn’s first entry into listening in on a virtual world. Early in 2004, Nic Ducheneaut and Bob Moore placed bots in the cantinas and starports of one server for Star Wars Galaxies, and collected the chat logs from those environments. My own descent into PlayOn was to help analyze the gigabyte of chat logs that had been collected.

Coming to WoW, we realized that Blizzard had opened up the game programming interface so that most of a player’s in-game actions can be automated, but still preventing game-playing bots. The /who command, combined with enough patience and a small matter of programming, enables a bot which can take a census of the entire logged-in world. Worlds, in fact, one faction at a time.