Socializing by Gaming

Abstract

Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs) like Defense of the Ancients and StarCraft II have attracted hundreds of millions of users who communicate, interact, and socialize with each other through gaming. In MOGs, rich social relationships emerge and can be used to improve gaming services such as match recommendation and game population retention, which are important for the user experience and the commercial value of the companies who run these MOGs. In this work, we focus on understanding social relationships in MOGs. We propose a graph model that is able to capture social relationships of a variety of types and strengths. We apply our model to real-world data collected from three MOGs that contain in total over 10 years of behavioral history for millions of players and matches. We compare social relationships in MOGs across different game genres and with regular online social networks like Facebook. Taking match recommendation as an example application of our model, we propose SAMRA, a Socially Aware Match Recommendation Algorithm that takes social relationships into account. We show that our model not only improves the precision of traditional link prediction approaches, but also potentially helps players enjoy games to a higher extent.

DSS: A Scalable and Efficient Stratified Sampling Algorithm for Large-Scale Datasets

“…Sample Representativeness. Degree distribution is an important property of social network and has frequently been analyzed in much social network research [3,10]. We evaluate the representativeness of the sampled datasets through evaluating the difference between the degree distributions of the stratified sampled datasets and that of the original datasets using Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test) [11,19].…”

Influencers in Multiplayer Online Shooters

“…With the popularity of persistent online games and mobile games, SNA began to be employed here as well. Social networks in games have been investigated using qualitative methods and ethnographic approaches [19], as well as using quantitative SNA [26,63]. The available SNA work is focused on massively multiplayer online games and other shared online virtual environments, using in-game social features such as friend lists to construct networks.…”

“…Summarizing, SNA as applied to games has been focused on the associations that form between players during and around the playing activity [20,26,45]. There is more limited work on social structures formed around games [47], not only for external services, but also distribution platforms such as Steam and Uplay.…”

MetaHate: AI‐based hate speech detection for secured online gaming in metaverse using blockchain

“…4,5 They have attracted hundreds of millions of people worldwide who communicate, interact, and socialize with each other through gaming. 6 Multiplayer gaming is an essential part of metaverse. They have gained immense popularity and served as an experimental platform for a variety of research fields like, 7,8 epidemiology 9,10 and social system 5 therefore a healthy social environment is necessary to promote positive reinforcement and social interaction during the games.…”

“…MOGs are games where many people can play in the same highly sophisticated 3D online environment and interact simultaneously 4,5 . They have attracted hundreds of millions of people worldwide who communicate, interact, and socialize with each other through gaming 6 . Multiplayer gaming is an essential part of metaverse.…”