Influencers in Multiplayer Online Shooters

Abstract

In a wide range of social networks, people's behavior is inluenced by social contagion: we do what our network does. Networks often feature particularly inluential individuals, commonly called łinluencers'. ' Existing work suggests that in-game social networks in online games are similar to reallife social networks in many respects. However, we do not know whether there are in-game equivalents to inluencers. We therefore applied standard social network features used to identify inluencers to the online multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy's The Division. Results show that network featuredeined inluencers had indeed an outsized impact on playtime and social play of players joining their in-game network.

#StayHome Playing LoL - Analyzing Players’ Activity and Social Bonds in League of Legends During Covid-19 Lockdowns

“…The literature on SNA and their application on games to learn about players and their social behaviors are wide. SNA is widely used to investigate many and different aspects of online games networks such as player interactions, player retention, the social structure of the game, engagement, influence, and communities [17,24,30,46,54]. Many studies focus on multiplayer games, which use a rich range of social features to build networks, such as friend lists or guilds [17,18].…”

“…SNA is widely used to investigate many and different aspects of online games networks such as player interactions, player retention, the social structure of the game, engagement, influence, and communities [17,24,30,46,54]. Many studies focus on multiplayer games, which use a rich range of social features to build networks, such as friend lists or guilds [17,18]. Others build the network starting from the match-making mechanism itself, linking two players if they played together [34,47,51].…”

“…Nodes represented players connected by an edge between if they played in a match as teammates. This way of modeling players' in-game implicit relationships is common in the GUR literature, in studies analyzing LoL [51] and other team-based games [17,46]. The gathering processes we followed, were identically repeated for each geographical region (i.e., EUW, NA, and KR).…”

Online Video Game Influencer's Credibility and Purchase Intention

“…As Törhönen et al (2020) discussed, gaming influencers can affect the audience in two ways: they can create the need to play some game and provide relevant information on the game. Also, as Canossa et al (2019) described, video game influencers can impact the gameplay habits of their followers, including their decisions on purchasing specific game-related items using real money. The popularity of online video game influencers in some cultures is so high that it became one of the most popular occupations among children (The LEGO group, 2019).…”