On churn and social contagion

Zoheb Borbora, Arpita Chandra, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Jaideep Srivastava

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019
EditorsFrancesca Spezzano, Wei Chen, Xiaokui Xiao
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages833-841
Number of pages9
ISBN (Electronic)9781450368681
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 27 2019
Event11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Aug 27 2019Aug 30 2019

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019

Conference

Conference11th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, ASONAM 2019
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period8/27/198/30/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

Keywords

  • Churn
  • Clustering
  • Player typology
  • Social contagion
  • Supervised learning

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