January 2025
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Publications (31)
January 2024
October 2023
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19 Reads
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds
Organizing games by categories based on playstyle (e.g. single-player vs. multiplayer) makes sense from a marketing perspective, but when it comes to organizing players into such categories, things get tricky. To illustrate that categorizing players based on preferences for single-player vs. multiplayer games may be problematic, we analysed millions of posts in Reddit for single-player and multiplayer games to see which players use more extroversion (pro-social) words, citing research suggesting that those who prefer multiplayer games should use more extroversion words. We found no noticeable differences between the two groups, although unexpectedly single-player gamers did use more extroversion words in a statistically significant manner. Ultimately, we offer caution that categorization of games and gamers – although useful at times – can oversimplify assumed preferences and, when not critically examined, may lead to the reification of misleading and exclusionary categories of both games and the people who play them.
January 2023
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1 Read
May 2022
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26 Reads
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8 Citations
The Information Society
In this article, we examine how a loosely knit, mediated community in the massively multiplayer online game EverQuest II rapidly coalesced to carry out collective action in response to a request to help a terminally ill child. We examine the factors that motivated hundreds of people to donate their time, expertise, and in-game resources to people they had never met. These factors included specific affordances of the many technologies relied upon, the emotional weight and urgency of the initial post, both trusted and well-connected actors in the network, and a sense of belonging to the greater community by many of those who helped. Furthering our knowledge on how rituals surrounding death and mourning work in digital networks can provide insights into the continued health of online communities in general.
April 2022
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10 Reads
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9 Citations
Social Media + Society
This study builds on existing research about churn and community movement, examining if language use on Reddit can be used to determine if people signal their intent to relocate to a new community before they actually do so. Using a computational and semantic approach, we studied the subreddits for the game series Fallout at the time Fallout 76 ( FO76) was released to see if the users of the Fallout 4 ( FO4) subreddit signaled how they would react to the new subreddit. The main difference we found was that those who stay in the FO4 subreddit or use both subreddits on average post more often and create longer posts than those who move to the FO76 subreddit or leave. This adds further evidence to support theories about community as communication, and we suggest this finding can help online community managers identify which users may be about to leave the community, aiding retention and the overall health of the community.
January 2022
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23 Reads
August 2021
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17 Reads
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5 Citations
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
Guilds, a primary form of community in many online games, are thought to both aid gameplay and act as social entities. This work uses a three-year scrape of one game, World of Warcraft, to study the relationship between guild membership and advancement in the game as measured by character leveling, a defining and often studied metric. 509 guilds and 90,581 characters are included in the analysis from a three-year period with over 36 million observations, with linear regression to measure the effect of guild membership. Overall findings indicate that guild membership does not aid character leveling to any significant extent. The benefits of guilds may be replicated by players in smaller guilds or not in guilds through game affordances and human sociability.
April 2021
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614 Reads
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22 Citations
Social Media + Society
We studied the Reddit communities for three game franchises at the time of a new release in each franchise to see what the members of the Reddit community for the now-older game would do in terms of their community involvement and membership. Specifically, we sought to determine if community members transitioned to the community for a new game, leaving behind their established community devoted to the now-older game. Our main finding was that most people did not move to the new community, but instead remained with their established community. We argue that nostalgia played an important role for community members, whom we frame as fans. Data came from Reddit communities for The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and the Civilization franchises, comprising data on over 10 million posts from five different year-long time periods, each centered on the release of a new game in each of those franchises.
January 2021
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27 Reads
Citations (19)
... In the current literature, there is only little specific work on how player behaviors are related to player networks, social dynamics in games [19], [23], [24]), and the psychological aspect of the player and their in-game activities [25]. As the study of the social dynamics in games is rare, the combination of network data and contextual data is almost nonexistent; exception made for the work of Rattinger et al. [26] and Schiller et al. [27]. ...
- Citing Article
August 2021
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media
... TTRPGs also provide emotional support, as seen in Poor et al. (2022), where a gaming community created virtual spaces for a player's terminally ill child, demonstrating their capacity for solidarity and comfort. Social bonds are further strengthened through shared participation, fostering trust, self-efficacy, and social skills, making TTRPGs valuable for treating social anxiety (Underwood, 2009;Abbott et al., 2021). ...
- Citing Article
May 2022
The Information Society
... For online health community, the sustained activity of members is essential (Burke et al., 2009;Malinen, 2015;Poor and Skoric, 2014), while the departure of members, especially core members, is harmful to the community. The rate at which members disengage from a specific group is colloquially denoted as "churn" (Bergstrom and Poor, 2022). The loss of core members often leads to the decline of content production, particularly for organizations like online health communities which rely heavily on member communication. ...
- Citing Article
April 2022
Social Media + Society
... For this study, the public streaming Reddit application programming interface was used to collect and analyze all publicly available posts from r/StopGaming. Reddit was chosen based on previous studies that have used the platform to characterize substance use and gaming behaviors separately [19,20]. First, to ensure this subreddit is appropriate for examination, the dataset was filtered for keywords related to disordered gaming, including "internet gaming disorder" and "gaming addiction." ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
April 2021
Social Media + Society
... As Scheliga et al. (2018) argue, quality assurance is pivotal to the success of open-source initiatives. Dispersed and diverse expertise may cause problems and even contribute to their failure (Faraj and Sproull 2000;Pfaff and Hasan 2007;Poor 2020). For example, Nupedia -the predecessor to Wikipedia -was abandoned largely due to the complicated process of article reviewing (Rosenzweig, 2006). ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
August 2020
Media and Communication
... While virtual worlds can cultivate intimacy, the increasing interconnectivity of digital platforms makes it difficult to consider these relationships in an isolated "magic circle" [30]. Scholars have shown how MMOG social and ludic elements intertwine with Twitch [41,51], Discord [9,32,43], Reddit, YouTube [29], and other platforms. For example, in FFXIV, players often coordinate raids, plan in-game weddings, and extend personal discussions via Discord [9,23,38,57], while Twitch streams foster deeper viewer investment in streamers' lives [21]. ...
- Citing Conference Paper
August 2019
... Using platforms more directly as a coordinative mechanism (expanding on their standard ticketing role) may create orchestration behaviours in the network that will help narrow distances between actors and lead to collaboration. Platforms as institutional mechanisms shape outcomes and have a policy-making function (Davidson & Poor, 2019). Platform managers, as network managers, can bring together actors and influence the degree of proximity between them by aiding collaboration discussions (Haveri & Anttiroiko, 2021). ...
- Citing Article
March 2018
... Studying the assimilation process in games like WoW is important because it may point out highly effective design mechanisms to integrate newcomers into online organizational structures, encouraging identification and retention. Previous game and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research on WoW's organizations focused on the description of social and group dynamics [1,4,16,26,27,65,100], as well as on the role of the organizational culture, intra-group conflict and cohesion for newcomer socialization [15,43,73]. In this article, I focus on the players' individual "journey" in becoming full members of the game's organizations, and thus involved in their dynamics. ...
- Citing Conference Paper
January 2016
... Hence, it is imperative to scrutinize the determinants that shape contributorsʼ intentions to engage with crowdfunding platforms. Research dedicated to exploring the inclination to utilize crowdfunding platforms has been underway since the inception of this phenomenon, delving into perspectives from both fund seekers (Ba et al., 2020;Davidson & Poor, 2016;Jaziri & Miralam, 2019;Yang & Lee, 2019) and contributors Kang et al., 2016;Liu et al., 2018;Rodriguez-Ricardo et al., 2019;Zhao et al., 2017). Despite the breadth of these investigations, there exists a discernible gap in comprehending how specific platform features wield influence over contributorsʼ intentions. ...
- Citing Article
October 2015
... From an internal perspective, the motivations of employees of institutions and those of individual fundraisers differ. Individual fundraisers see adoption as a personal journey, potentially well-suited for extroverted personality types willing to learn new skills (e.g., Davidson & Poor, 2015). Conversely, employees of cultural institutions are driven by a sense of responsibility for ensuring a good outcome for their employer and take pride in having crowdfunding as an activity that they can share with their friends and family (Bump, 2014;Cavalcanti Junqueira, 2021;Erb, 2015). ...
- Citing Article
- Publisher preview available
February 2015