Ang, Chee Siang, and Panayiotis Zaphiris. "Simulating social networks of online communities: simulation as a method for sociability design." Human-Computer Interaction–INTERACT 2009: 12th IFIP TC 13 International Conference, Uppsala, Sweden, August 24-28, 2009, Proceedings, Part II 12. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2009.

This paper proposes the use of social simulations, specifically an Agent-Based Model (ABM), to study and design online communities, focusing on a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) guild community. The authors analyze the activities and social network patterns of an existing guild community to derive interaction rules, which are then implemented in the simulation. The simulation accurately reproduces the observed social network, validating its effectiveness. The authors use the simulation to explore how various parameters, such as activity level and number of neighbors, influence the characteristics of the social networks within the community.