World of Warcraft as a Social Science Lab

I have just started reading a delightful new book about World of Warcraft entitled The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World by William Sims Bainbridge. Since I am only about 20 pages into it, it is too early to say much other than what I have read so far is terrific. However, I wanted to point to a comment made by the author.

"WoW is a very conducive environment for quantitative research because it encourages individuals to write "mod" or "add-on" programs, and scientists can use some existing software as research tools or write their own. These range all the way from very simple sequences of character behaviors constructed using macros built into the WoW user interface, to long programs written in the Lua language. For example, one widely used program called Auctioneer analyzes prices on the WoW virtual item auction system [the Auction House], and CensusPlus tallies all the players currently online by several characteristics. With census data on more than 200,000 WoW characters, a team centered at the Palo Alto Research Center analyzed the factors associated with the upward status mobility of individuals and the dynamics of social groups" [pg 12]

I found this interesting because I have been looking at video games as an object of study in this blog and hadn't really considered them as a laboratory for study. One of my goals in keeping this blog was to get to the essence of video games for the purposes of research. As more and more comes out, I seem to be getting further and further away from that initial goal.