TY - GEN
T1 - Play Together, Stay Together? Community Cohesion and Stability in an MMO
AU - Poor, Nathaniel
AU - Skoric, Marko
N1 - Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s).
PY - 2016/3
Y1 - 2016/3
N2 - Small-scale qualitative studies have shown group cohesion in games can be strong enough to allow groups to transfer to new settings, but this phenomenon has not been studied with a large-scale dataset to see if it is widespread or rare. Using a three-year scrape of an MMO, World of Warcraft, the guild membership and playing time of over 90,000 characters was observed for patterns indicating group cohesion or character pairings. Groups of players who play together do stay together across time and guild changes, sometimes across multiple guild changes, indicating social ties. An average of 2/3 of the characters seen both week-to-week and across fourweek periods stay in the same guild, suggesting a baseline for social stability. Previously documented rupture events, although important to study, are actually rare and unrepresentative of the continual slow turnover found here.
AB - Small-scale qualitative studies have shown group cohesion in games can be strong enough to allow groups to transfer to new settings, but this phenomenon has not been studied with a large-scale dataset to see if it is widespread or rare. Using a three-year scrape of an MMO, World of Warcraft, the guild membership and playing time of over 90,000 characters was observed for patterns indicating group cohesion or character pairings. Groups of players who play together do stay together across time and guild changes, sometimes across multiple guild changes, indicating social ties. An average of 2/3 of the characters seen both week-to-week and across fourweek periods stay in the same guild, suggesting a baseline for social stability. Previously documented rupture events, although important to study, are actually rare and unrepresentative of the continual slow turnover found here.
KW - MMO
KW - video games
KW - social cohesion
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84975481992
UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/pubmetrics.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84975481992&origin=recordpage
U2 - 10.1109/HICSS.2016.283
DO - 10.1109/HICSS.2016.283
M3 - RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)
T3 - Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
SP - 2266
EP - 2275
BT - 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
A2 - Bui, Tung X.
A2 - Sprague, Jr., Ralph H.
PB - IEEE
T2 - 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)
Y2 - 5 January 2016 through 8 January 2016
ER -