Linking behavior in a virtual world environment

Linking between separate virtual world environments differs significantly from flat web linking, both in terms of technical challenges and user experience. Considering these differences, and the need for individual users to actually create links between locations, it is not clear to what extent the technical linking capability will lead to a truly interconnected world wide web of 3D environments. In order to study linking behavior in a current 3D environment, we examined explicit landmark links as well as implicit avatar pick links in Second Life to determine if linking patterns in a large virtual world corresponded to linking behavior in the flat web. To collect landmark and favorites data, we designed a multi-agent virtual world crawler system to collect publicly available landmarks and avatar picks. To compare the link graph structure of the virtual world link graph to the flat web link graph, we replicate the analysis performed on several flat web link graphs and compare the results. We also explore the correlation between location ranking based on link-based algorithms to internally tracked traffic rankings, which has only recently been done with flat web data sets. We find that although the virtual world link graph is more sparse than the flat web, the underlying structure is quite similar. That users have generated this link graph despite the relative difficulty of creating and following links in the Second Life environment indicates that linking is valued by users, and making linking easier would likely result in a richer user experience.