  Massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) are very popular in
China, which provides a potential platform for scientific research. We study
the online-offline activities of avatars in an MMORPG to understand their
game-playing behavior. The statistical analysis unveils that the active avatars
can be classified into three types. The avatars of the first type are owned by
game cheaters who go online and offline in preset time intervals with the
online duration distributions dominated by pulses. The second type of avatars
is characterized by a Weibull distribution in the online durations, which is
confirmed by statistical tests. The distributions of online durations of the
remaining individual avatars differ from the above two types and cannot be
described by a simple form. These findings have potential applications in the
game industry.
