The Power of Social Features in Online Gaming

The Power of Social Features in Online Gaming

Kuipers, F.A. (TU Delft Embedded and Networked Systems)
Märtens, M. (TU Delft Network Architectures and Services)
van der Hoeven, Ernst (Student TU Delft)
Iosup, A. (TU Delft Distributed Systems)

Lakkaraju, Kiran (editor)
Sukthankar, Gita (editor)
Wigand, Rolf T. (editor)

2018

Within the vast and rich field of online gaming, a new generation of Online Social Games (OSGs) is emerging that have in common a core of social interaction, sometimes explicit, other times implicit. This common core of social experience promises to become at least as important as the experience derived from the game-­‐world itself. In this chapter, we consider the social side of OSGs and provide the following contributions: 1.We motivate the importance of taking social features into account to improve the quality of experience in online gaming. 2.We discuss the various dimensions of (player experience in) OSGs.
3.We describe a social network analysis methodology for identifying relations in OSGs and indicate how this methodology could be used to improve the game-­‐play experience. 4.We also consider and illustrate how certain “social” behaviour, like toxicity, is negative and may harm the game-­‐play experience, if not adequately addressed. 5.We mention several directions for future research to put the power of social features in OSGs to good use.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1f497843-119f-4f55-be11-4c1121972d8b

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316422823.013

Cambridge University Press

9781316422823

Social Interactions in Virtual Worlds: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Institutional Repository

book chapter

© 2018 F.A. Kuipers, M. Märtens, Ernst van der Hoeven, A. Iosup