While you probably never met a bespectacled man with a pipe who asked you to sit down on a couch and tell him about your mother while playing Everquest, you may well have been psychoanalyzed at some point in your questing.  Four years of data for over 400,000 characters was passed on to researchers looking for various patterns in the demographics of the players and what they used the game for.  Probably the neatest trick was writing software to deal with over 60TB of data, the EQ2 servers capture absolutely everything that happens in the game, and that raw data is what had to be dealt with.  More about this at Ars Technica.

“Researchers ranging from psychologists to epidemiologists have wondered for some time whether online, multiplayer games might provide some ways to test concepts that are otherwise difficult to track in the real world. A Saturday morning session at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science described what might be the most likely way of finding out. With the cooperation of Sony, a collaborative group of academic researchers at a number of institutions have obtained the complete server logs from the company’s Everquest 2 MMORPG.”

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