Influencers in Multiplayer Online Shooters Evidence of Social Contagion in Playtime and Social Play

In a wide range of social networks, people’s behavior is influenced by social contagion: we do what our network does. Networks often feature particularly influential individuals, commonly called influencers. Existing work suggests that in-game social networks in online games are similar to real life social networks in many respects. However, we do not know whether there are in-game equivalents to influencers. We therefore applied standard social network features used to identify influencers to the online multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy’s The Division. Results show that network features defined influencers had indeed an outsized impact on playtime and social play of players joining their in-game network.