This is a repository copy of Beyond the Individual : Understanding Social Structures of an Online Player Matchmaking Website. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/141209/ Version: Published Version Article: Wallner, Guenter, schiller, michael, Pirker, Johanna et al. (1 more author) (2019) Beyond the Individual : Understanding Social Structures of an Online Player Matchmaking Website. Entertainment Computing. 100284. ISSN 1875-9521 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2019.01.002 Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. This licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. 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[email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Entertainment Computing 30 (2019) 100284 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Entertainment Computing journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/entcom Beyond the individual: Understanding social structures of an online player matchmaking website T ⁎ Günter Wallnera, , Christopher Schinnerlb, Michael Helfried Schillerb, Alexander Monte Calvoc, Johanna Pirkerb, Rafet Sifad, Anders Drachene a Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands b Graz University of Technology, Austria c Bungie, Inc., United States d Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany e University of York, United Kingdom ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: Engagement and player experience in multi-player games is influenced by the people you play with. For that Community analysis reason, grouping features and matchmaking facilities in games, as well as third-party services, have gained in Player-grouping services popularity in the industry and player community as they assist in building and maintaining social relationships Social network analysis with like-minded players. Understanding how social connections are formed and how these relations can foster Game analytics in-game activity offers insights for building and maintaining alayer p base and can, in turn, improve retention Destiny and engagement. This paper examines the social network formed by users of the the100.io – a social matchmaking website for the game Destiny. The service provides an opportunity to examine an online social network formed around a game combined with demographic and preference data. The paper explores the correlation of structural network properties with preference and game-related performance data, provides me- trics useful for analyzing and understanding the structure of these kinds of player networks and showcases how community analysis and behavioral profiling can be applied to inform game developers about behavioral groupings in social player networks. 1. Introduction gained in popularity because they assist in finding like-minded people to play with and thus in building and maintaining long-term social Engagement and user experience in online multi-player games are to relationships in and around games. For many players, such services a substantial extent influenced by the presence of and connectionsth wi have become an important aspect of their game playing activity. Un- other players. Social interaction and relationships in games are key derstanding social structures and how they are formed on such plat- drivers of engagement, retention, and monetization in multi-player forms – whether provided as part of the game or grown around a game games, and the facilitation and shepherding of social connections and or set of games – and how these relate to in-game activity can offer player communities forms an important component in maintaining a actionable insights for building and maintaining a player base and can player base [1]. They have been shown to be an invaluable tool to thus, in turn, improve retention and engagement [4]. Both of these enhance user engagement and in-game performance [2,3]. Despite factors are vital for building a financially viable game, notably in online these potentials, this remains an under-explored topic in games user multi-player games that rely on a semi-persistent or persistent structure research. The impact of social connections in games means that online [3,5,6]. multi-player or massively multi-player games provide dedicated Social networks established via grouping or matchmaking features matchmaking or group-generation facilities in order to group players or services with the same aim can be analyzed and visualized using with similarly skilled teammates, clanmates, guildmates, or opponents. techniques from Social Network Analysis (SNA, e.g., [3,6–10]) to il- Other games, however, lack such features or the grouping takes place in lustrate cooperative and competitive in-game interactions. SNA can an ad-hoc only fashion to find people for an upcoming match. In par- hence be used as a basis for investigating player interactions and re- allel, online player-grouping services and matchmaking services have lationships. For example, Pirker et al. [4] explored social connections ⁎ Corresponding author at: Systemic Change Building 3, Atlas, Floor 7 South, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands. E-mail address: [email protected] (G. Wallner). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.entcom.2019.01.002 Received 14 January 2019; Accepted 17 January 2019 Available online 29 January 2019 1875-9521/ © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/). G. Wallner et al. Entertainment Computing 30 (2019) 100284 formed in direct competitive play in the hybrid shooter Destiny [11] and provide tools for understanding patterns in the social behavior of investigated the impact of indirect social connections (connections players. formed through playing matches together) and direct social connections such as clan memberships on in-game behavior and combat perfor- 2. Related work mance. For data analysis, however, a central challenge remains in previous The analysis of social connections and structures has become com- and current work on social networks in and around digital games, in the monplace – originally for physical environments but with the in- lack of relation between the networks themselves and the individual troduction of online social networks also increasingly in such contexts user, including, for example, preference, motivational, and demo- since these networks facilitate the analysis of very large samples. In graphic data. This means that current knowledge is limited about how particular work on large-scale user platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, network behavior in games correlates with real-world preferences. Snapchat and the like have drawn attention to the uses of SNA to de- Furthermore, without taking such individual information in network scribe networks and cater to the needs and interests of the individual analysis into account, results can be difficult to act on by game com- users (e.g., [10]). Due to the large body of work in this space and in panies. Telemetry-based information about the social connections be- order to keep the discussion relevant to our work, we limit our dis- tween players generally provides information concerning in-game in- cussion to work in the context of digital games. teractions and does not link these to any self-report information, SNA in games has attracted relatively limited previous interest from demographic data or personal preferences. If such information is pre- the research community. This is not because game-related social net- sent, it will typically be only basic demographics gathered through works are less complex or evolved than online social networks in other third-party providers, or data on a small scale, for example, via asso- contexts but rather because data access is not as ubiquitous as for other ciated lab-based user research. online social networks [15]. However, results so far indicate that the interactions between players influence in-game behavior and, ulti- 1.1. Contribution mately, the user experience. Furthermore, social connections and in- teractions in games appear to be important motivational drivers for the Analysis of player social networks has so far largely focused on game playing activity itself [2,5,16,17]. This has sparked interest networks based on implicit relationships formed through interactions of among game companies, which are interested in social networks pri- the players with each other inside the game environment. Quantitative marily from the perspective of the impact social connections between structural analysis of online player communities, on the other hand, is players have on the playing experience, notably towards driving en- considerably scarcer, with Jia et al.’s [9] work on multiplayer online gagement, retention, and monetization [2,6]. SNA employed to in- games communities forming a notable exception. The the100.io vestigate the social interaction among users gained popularity in the player grouping service we are investigating in this paper provides a context of digital games with the introduction of social network games, rich view on the preferences of thousands of users of the service, of- i.e., games that are embedded in and played via an existing online