Remember the unwritten rules we usually have in the real world (no groping of people we don't know, no invading of personal space, no running around naked like a fool)? Researchers have discovered that some of those unwritten rules have followed people online.

Nick Yee and fellow researchers at the University of Stanford looked at the inhabitants of Linden Lab's Second Life to see if the online game's users behaved like people in the real world. Using a program to monitor 1,600 avatars and their social interactions, they concluded that certain social rules have entered into online interactions. For example, male avatars tend to stand further away from one another, and people who interacted in their study had the tendency to reduce their eye contact with people by shifting to one side.

What does this do for scientists? For starters, if it can be determined that people's interactions in a game like Second Life are much like the interactions of people offline, certain online games would be an alternative yet reliable place to acquire social data. Yee and company also mention that the game could very well have a far more diverse pool of individuals to work with.

The only difficulty is in finding out which kind of social concepts travel from the real world into the game world. Risk, for example isn't as big a deal online, and thoughts of death in-game are more of minor inconveniences than the "end" that we know of in real life. This study, at the very least is the first step towards knowing more.

As for gamers, it helps if you're observant. You may just find out that the way you act online can be more or less like the way you act in the real world... so we better learn to behave!