STRIVE: Socio-behavioral Taxonomy Representation for Interactive Virtual Environments

We introduce STRIVE, a framework to build socio-behavioral taxonomies in multiplayer online games using unsupervised learning on common features across many social games.This work demonstrates this framework on "Sky: Children of the Light," a social adventure game by Thatgamecompany, using features such as cooperative play, social bonding, and in-game communication.After performing descriptive statistics, clustering and dimensionality reduction, we assign semantic categories to these behavior clusters.Next we perform a behavior prediction experiment where the most social cluster's behavior has a higher correlation with future play time and chats sent than predicting on the full dataset.These results suggest the importance of customized, or personalized, player behavior prediction models.Moreover, this framework could be easily extended to other games and further augment our understanding of human behavior in virtual worlds, ultimately aiding social scientists and game designers to better match players together for healthier online interactions.