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Socializing by Gaming: Revealing Social Relationships in Multiplayer Online Games

Published:12 October 2015Publication History
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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 ten 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.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
      ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data  Volume 10, Issue 2
      October 2015
      291 pages
      ISSN:1556-4681
      EISSN:1556-472X
      DOI:10.1145/2835206
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2015 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 12 October 2015
      • Accepted: 1 February 2015
      • Revised: 1 October 2014
      • Received: 1 May 2014
      Published in tkdd Volume 10, Issue 2

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