TY - CHAP
T1 - Gaming on and off the social graph
T2 - 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom 2009
AU - Kirman, Ben
AU - Lawson, Shaun
AU - Linehan, Conor
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of playerto player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph.
AB - Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of playerto player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/70849107125
U2 - 10.1109/CSE.2009.266
DO - 10.1109/CSE.2009.266
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:70849107125
SN - 9780769538235
T3 - Proceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, CSE 2009
SP - 627
EP - 632
BT - Proceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, CSE 2009 - 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom 2009
Y2 - 29 August 2009 through 31 August 2009
ER -