A Game Theoretic Approach for Modeling User-System Interaction in Networked Virtual Environments

Networked Virtual Environments (NVEs) are distributed 3D simulations shared among geographically dispersed users. Adaptive resource allocation is a key issue in NVEs, since user interactions affect system resources which in turn affect the user's experience. Such interplay between the users and the system can be modeled using Game Theory. Game Theory is an analytical tool that studies decision-making between interacting agents (players), where player decisions impact greatly other players. We propose a basic structure for a Game Theory model that describes the interaction between the users and the system in NVEs based on an exploratory study of mobile virtual environments.