To dwell among gamers: Investigating the relationship between social online game use and gaming-related friendships

Abstract Social online games are a mass phenomenon and, for most of the users, a social activity. Even though there are numerous studies on social online games they do not explicitly investigate the offline contacts of the gamers, which play a significant role for their social embeddedness. Regarding the online gaming-related contacts possible strong ties such as friendship relationships are often neglected. Additionally modality switching between the two spheres is not further investigated. In this paper, we strive to extend the research on the interrelation of social game use and the social embeddedness of social online gamers, as well as modality switching between the online and offline context. In doing so we provide new insights into the emergence and quality of gaming-related relationships. We collected information on everyday life as well as on gaming-related friendships from a representative sample of 2213 gamers and 287 non-gamers in Germany. Our results show that social online gamers do not differ significantly from other gamers or non-gamers regarding the number of their good friends. However, we found a significant impact of social online gaming frequency on the probability of meeting exclusively online friends. Different social motives played an important role for modality switching processes. Players with a pronounced motive to gain social capital and to play in a team had the highest probability to transform their social relations from online to offline context. We found that social online gamers are well integrated and use the game to spend time with old friends—and to recruit new ones. Our results suggest that gaming-related ties might be very useful: especially modality switching between the two spheres might lead to strong ties and accordingly to additional bonding social capital.

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