At Sandia National Labs, Agent Based Modeling (ABMs) allows for scientists to explore how political, technological, or natural events shift social behavior in ways that impact national security. Severe challenges exist in creating these models due to problems in allocating high-volumes of data from the real-world to inform and validate these models.

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have recently emerged as a tractable way to acquire data on social phenomena, because these virtual environments are able to capture a great amount of data and at high- fidelity, often tracking the actions of many individuals at a time resolution of seconds. As well, the social structures expressed in MMOGs reflect those employed in the real-world, leading to mirroring behaviors that make MMOGs an attractive data source for ABM validation.

This talk will cover research taking place at Sandia National Labs in using MMOGs to improve Agent Based Modeling construction and validation. In particular, we will discuss recent research on analyzing the motivations for people to participate in a Large Scale Conflict (LSCs), and the correlates between theoretical frameworks generated from known civil wars to what we have observed within a virtual world.