A social scientific framework for social systems in online video games: Building a better looking for raid loot system in World of Warcraft

• The ethnography and interviews provide key insights into the rules and behavior of players.
• The results of the survey reveal that expectations and behavior are not in line.
• The results of the survey reveal that expectations have a positive relationship with behavior.
• We are able to construct a semi-formal game theoretic model from our results.

This paper examines social behavior in the online video game World of Warcraft. Specifically focusing on one element of social design: the behavior of players in the first release of Looking-for-Raid (LFR) loot system of World of Warcraft. It uses lens of economic game theory, combined with Williams (2010) mapping principle and a modern theoretical account of human decision-making, to explore how theory about individual interactions in well-defined contexts (games) can explain collective behavior. It provides some support for this theoretical approach with an examination of data collected as part of an ethnographic study, through focus groups, and a survey distributed to 333 World of Warcraft players. It concludes with a discussion of the results and some guidelines for predicting collective outcomes in certain types of online games using the introduced framework.