Temporal Patterns of Structural Deception Behavior in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game

Today online game analytics has gained tremendous attention in big-data driven business and academic research in terms of capturing and understanding human social dynamics based on real interactional large-scaled data. In this paper, we attempt to understand and characterize the dynamics of deception in terms of social structural behavior by leveraging online game data to investigate temporal patterns of deception in group communication. To this end, we developed a research model, collected the data from a real-world online game site, constructed social networks, and compared structural behaviors of deceiving role ´mafia´ and truth-telling role ´cop´ across different time periods. The results demonstrated that some structural behaviors of deceivers change over time, while others do not, compared to those of truth-tellers.