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On churn and social contagion

Published: 15 January 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are persistent virtual environments where millions of players interact in an online manner. We study the problem of player churn and social contagion using MMORPG game logs by analyzing the impact of a node's churn behavior on its immediate neighborhood or group. The two key research questions in this paper are - When an active node, ego, becomes dormant, what is the impact on the activity behavior of ego's immediate neighbor, alter, 1) based on ego's characteristics and ego's relationship with alter and 2) based on the activity behavior of alter's remaining neighbors. We use a supervised learning framework to study the impact of player churn and social contagion. Experimental results show that the classification models perform substantially better than random for both the research problems. Finally, we use a data-driven approach to propose a player typology based on degree of socialization and analyze churn behavior among these player types. Experimental results show that the loner player type is much more likely to churn than the socializer player types and as the degree of socialization decreases among socializers, the propensity to churn increases.

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Churn Classification: An Exploration of Features to Improve the Performance2022 IEEE Engineering International Research Conference (EIRCON)10.1109/EIRCON56026.2022.9934807(1-4)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Social networks for enhanced player churn prediction in mobile free-to-play gamesApplied Network Science10.1007/s41109-022-00524-57:1Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2021)The Quirks of Being a Wallflower: Towards Defining Lurkers and Loners in Games Through A Systematic Literature ReviewExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451830(1-7)Online publication date: 8-May-2021

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ASONAM '19: Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining
August 2019
1228 pages
ISBN:9781450368681
DOI:10.1145/3341161
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 January 2020

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Author Tags

  1. churn
  2. clustering
  3. player typology
  4. social contagion
  5. supervised learning

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ASONAM '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 41 of 286 submissions, 14%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 116 of 549 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Churn Classification: An Exploration of Features to Improve the Performance2022 IEEE Engineering International Research Conference (EIRCON)10.1109/EIRCON56026.2022.9934807(1-4)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Social networks for enhanced player churn prediction in mobile free-to-play gamesApplied Network Science10.1007/s41109-022-00524-57:1Online publication date: 15-Dec-2022
  • (2021)The Quirks of Being a Wallflower: Towards Defining Lurkers and Loners in Games Through A Systematic Literature ReviewExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451830(1-7)Online publication date: 8-May-2021

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