Reddit Gaming Communities During Times of Transition

Abstract

We studied the Reddit communities for three game franchises at the time of a new release in each franchise to see what the members of the Reddit community for the now-older game would do in terms of their community involvement and membership. Specifically, we sought to determine if community members transitioned to the community for a new game, leaving behind their established community devoted to the now-older game. Our main finding was that most people did not move to the new community, but instead remained with their established community. We argue that nostalgia played an important role for community members, whom we frame as fans. Data came from Reddit communities for The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and the Civilization franchises, comprising data on over 10 million posts from five different year-long time periods, each centered on the release of a new game in each of those franchises.

Signaling the Intent to Change Online Communities: A Case From a Reddit Gaming Community

“…Buntain and Golbeck (2014) studied community members on Reddit and found that people belong to one community, posting to one subreddit only. This mirrors findings in our previous work examining periods of transition in three different game franchises, including The Elder Scrolls (Bergstrom & Poor, 2021). Buntain and Golbeck’s study took place during times of relative stability for those online communities, and it provided the groundwork for our examination of relative instability for Reddit communities: studying user behavior around the time of a new release in a game series.…”

Discourse of Gaming: A Conceptual Framework of Gaming as an Interpretive Community

“…We must note that subculture reflected on in this study, Reddit, reflects a particular subculture of gaming (Bergstrom & Poor, 2021;Proferes et al, 2021) and hence may not be reflective of more casual gaming communities where a person "would not describe herself as a gamer" (Vanderhoef, 2013, para. 9).…”

“…Specifically, we are demonstrating the nature of discourse within one portion of the gaming community -namely, one comprised largely of younger, White, male players who frequently play violent video games (see Table 1). The Reddit sample, in other words, has benefit of circumscribing attention to a specific audience (Proferes et al, 2021) that tends to reflect the most devoted or "hardcore" gamers; however, this also means, conversely, that there will be less reflection of causal gamer communities reflected in the dialogue (Bergstrom & Poor, 2021).…”

Participatory Cultures of Digital Games: The Double-Edged Sword of Being a Reddit Community Moderator

“…Gaming culture on social media Bergstrom and Poor (2021) explore the fluidity and attachment of fan membership in Reddit gaming communities, by observing three subreddit communities dedicated to three different game franchises at the time of a new release or sequel to the franchise. The presumption is that fans and their consumption are deeply connected, to the extent that fans ought to want to migrate to the new subreddit community dedicated to the new release in the franchise.…”

“…Robards' (2018) emphasis on neotribalism in subreddits and how they are meticulous when it comes to content being relevant to the topic of the subreddit provides a deeper understanding of Bergstrom and Poor's (2021) findings on fluidity in fan commitment to subreddits. Robards (2018) suggests that Reddit users are interlocked in the sense that they are also members of other subreddits that are remotely related to the 'umbrella' subreddit, such as in the case of the subreddits dedicated to Bethesda's game franchise The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout.…”