An analysis of the BBO fans online social gaming community

Online social gaming is an emerging Internet application that combines online gaming and online social networking functionality for the benefit of millions of daily users. While researchers have investigated the structure of (social) networks for decades, the activity characteristics and the community structure of online social gaming remain relatively unknown. To address this situation, in this work we investigate the BBO Fans club for online bridge. First, we introduce a method to collect and analyze data from BBO Fans and its underlying gaming platform. Our method is novel in that it addresses the lack of a strict definition of social relationship between BBO Fans players, and it defines several player types with implications on community formation and operation. Second, we use the proposed method to collect and analyze a 40-day BBO Fans dataset comprising over 140,000 unique players and over 3,000,000 unique play sessions. Third, we compare the characteristics of BBO Fans with other large social networking and online gaming applications. We find in particular that BBO Fans generates similar levels of activity as but has different community characteristics than similarly-sized games on FaceBook, the largest social network in the world.