Moving Beyond Churn: Barriers and Constraints to Playing a Social Network Game

Abstract

Social network games (SNGs) are genre of casual games that require being logged into a social networking site (e.g., Facebook) to access the gameworld. To date, investigations of these games are typically focused on the rate of attrition or "churn," reinforcing the idea that SNG players exist to make the developer money rather than participating in a game they derive pleasure from. Seeking to recenter the player in research about SNGs, this article reports on a survey of former players (N ¼ 147) who were queried about their reason(s) for no longer participating in YoWorld, a Facebook-based SNG. Findings indicate that players typically quit because of external constraints to their leisure time rather than no longer interested in the game, which are not barriers to play that can be overcome by personalized in-game incentives, the typical developer response to prevent churn from taking place.

Who Stays in the Game? Similarities and Differences Between Current and Former Digital Games Players

“…That women made up more of the solo players who ultimately left gaming in our sample suggests the need for future research to better understand if the lack of family members to play with (Cluster 4) has an impact on their decision to ultimately quit. While our previous research has found that women are more likely to quit playing in order to care for a family member [2], to date we have not encountered women who describe a lack of family to play with ultimately causing them to leave gaming. Future research is required to unpack the possible implications for this finding.…”

“…Because our previous findings suggest that women are more likely to have constraints on their leisure time than men [2,4], we deliberately over sampled women in order to collect as many as possible open ended survey responses from former and non-players. Our overall numbers were corrected back to being a representative US sample using the following methods.…”

EVE Online is not for Everyone: Exceptionalism in Online Gaming Cultures

“…In this article, I continue my previous research that disrupts biological deterministic arguments surrounding who plays what games and for what reasons (Bergstrom, 2019a(Bergstrom, , 2019c. Throughout my work, I have argued that gendered assumptions about who plays digital games, what games they play, and for what reasons they play are complicated when feminist games scholarship is put into conversation with leisure scholarship.…”

REDDIT'S COMMUNITIES & CONSEQUENCES

“…Investigations into why users leave other online communities, such as the communities that invariably form around online multiplayer games, found that players often leave for reasons beyond a personal lack of interest and instead there are internal or external forces that push a user towards disengagement (Bergstrom, 2019;Jiang, 2018;Poor & Skoric, 2014). Our goal here is to better understand why users disengage from Reddit.…”