A Game Theoretic Approach for Modeling User-System Interaction in Networked Virtual Environments

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are distributed 3D simulations shared among geographically dispersed users. Adaptive resource allocation is a key issue in NVEs, since user interactions affect system resources which in turn affect the user´s experience. Such interplay between the users and the system can be modeled using Game Theory. Game Theory is an analytical tool that studies decision-making between interacting agents (players), where player decisions impact greatly other players. We propose a basic structure for a Game Theory model that describes the interaction between the users and the system in NVEs based on an exploratory study of mobile virtual environments.