As someone who runs a fairly large multiplayer game with a good mix of children, teenagers, and adults, I've always been convinced of this[1] but haven't had any data to back it up, and I certainly didn't have the time or drive to conclusively demonstrate it like these fine folks did.<p>I would love to see someone tackle some solutions to this problem with some A/B testing. Sadly I don't think my userbase is large enough or antisocial enough for me to effectively test it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/3op7e2/whats_up_with_these_riot_surveys/cvze54n?context=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/3op7e2/wha...</a>
From reading the results, they found out that you could guess someone's name when they put a year in the username and that antisocial words meant the person was more likely to be a jerk.<p>Am I missing something here? The idea that SatansDick2007 is probably an 8 year old troll won't come as a shock to much of anyone.
I played LoL briefly during the beta and before the Tribunal was implemented, and even won their first contest (logo lookout) when Nikita was still an intern for Riot. I was very interested in the community and the lore since Riot was proactive in words and, for a brief time, actions.<p>I even have an email dated Oct 12 2010:<p>> 2. Has the idea of a "Summoner Spotlight" ever been discussed? I think a small article written by a Summoner about their own character, and approved by Riot Staff could do wonders to enrich Roleplay almost to the point of The Hollow.[0]<p>Suddenly, on Oct 22 2010 Summoner Spotlights showed up! Probably a coincidence since the content was totally different, but for a fan like me at the time it was exciting. [1]<p>To say I was drooling the Kool-Aid at the idea of having a positive community would be an understatement.<p>Then something must have happened internally because Babaganush was soon fired and nothing was really done to stop the community from suddenly becoming overwhelmed with adolescents describing their urges surrounding "Nikasaur" once the Spotlights did show up. That, coupled with the in-game behavior, made the whole community smell of rot.<p>I left after it became clear Riot was not actually focused on really cleaning up the community. Riot took the game towards the e-sports competitive scene which, sadly, helped shape the community into what it was and is. I've heard the Tribunal has helped, but it's not one of those features that is going to make me come back.<p>[0] <a href="http://imgur.com/VfUvarl" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/VfUvarl</a><p>[1] <a href="http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Summoner_Showcase" rel="nofollow">http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Summoner_Showcase</a><p>EDIT: To the downvoters, if you disagree with how I am recounting history, please do elaborate. Riot got rid of a significant amount of their moderate playerbase by their early business decisions, which was a contributing factor to having a negative-attitude playerbase in the 2010-2012 years. That negative attitude at this point has become a stereotype, and perhaps it could have been avoided.
It's a weak result. When I saw the title, I thought it might be useful for detecting jerks on blogs and Wikipedia. It's not. The mean age of their sample is 15.9 years. This result may not apply to higher ages, even college age.<p>Running a similar analysis on Wikipedia might be interesting, minus the age analysis.
Yeah, it's pretty obvious that online usernames say a lot about someone's age and personality. Heck, they often say a lot about a variety of other things too, like their gender and political affiliation.<p>Either way, while it was fairly obvious to anyone who runs forums or other communities, it's nice to see some actual research that backs up our common sense intuitions here.<p>On another note though, do you what would also be interesting to study here?<p>The correlation between avatars and age, psychology, etc.<p>Because let's face it, the picture someone choses to go with their profile (or the in game model they design or choose for an online game) says at least as much about them as their name does. A lot of people do tend to choose pictures or characters that look a bit like what they look like in real life (or in a lot of kids case, what they wished they looked like).<p>P.S. Am I the only one somewhat surprised about the 'ages figured from usernames tend to match what was entered on registration' aspect? Given that a lot of games and communities are 13+ only (or perhaps older), I'd expect a lot of kids to lie about their age when signing up.
This analysis is certainly interesting, but I can't help but think supervised machine learning (e.g. neural networks) would have been a far better way to analyze this data.<p>We're using neural networks to predict future actions of users from weakly-correlating metrics and achieved surprising accuracy from one day of tinkering.
What about cultural references in user names? The use of non-English words can reflect cultures other than American. Someone with the name "Browncoat" (a Firefly reference) may be younger than the name "Krell" (a Klingon in the original Star Trek).<p>I imagine there are other types of information that can be inferred from an alias. It supports the argument that metadata contains private information. As well whether use of pseudonyms provides anonymity.
The most interesting part of this to me was that fact that players tend to use their birth year in their username. And that the number 88 was a statistical outlier because for some reason people must really like that number.