Using empirical data on players' game choices and gaming behaviors and their relationships and interactions with other players on an online casual games portal site, Kongregate, I conduct three separate but complementary studies of ways in which other players may influence a player's game choices and gaming behavior. First, I examine whether a game player's game choice is influenced by other players with whom the player has direct connections and interacts on Kongregate. On Kongregate, a player is said to be have a direct connection with another player if she forms a connection with the other player by clicking the `friend' button linked to the latter. Once a player has established a direct connection with a second Kongregate player, then the first player can initiate a chat with the second player via a dedicated communication channel between them and the first player receives information such as what games the other player is playing and has played. I also study how the influence of other players with whom a player has direct connections on Kongregate on the player's game choices varies with the closeness of the connections between the player and those other players. In this dissertation, the closeness of the connection between two people refers to the strength of the tie (relationship) between them. The strength of a tie between two people is a function of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy, and the reciprocal services that characterize the tie between those two people (Granovetter, 1973, p1361). According to the theory of planned behavior and several studies of peer influence (e.g., Garnier & Stein, 2002; Maxwell, 2002; Thornberry & Krohn, 1997), an individual's behavior is more likely to be influenced by someone close than others.Second, I examine the importance of certain the homophily and social influence processes in the formation of relationships among friends on Kongregate and changes in their gaming behaviors, focusing on game genre preferences and gaming frequency. The homophily principle says that a person is more likely to be friends with others who are similar to herself than others who are dissimilar (Steglich et al., 2006). This suggests that a game player is more likely to be friends with other players who have similar gaming characteristics than others who do not. On the other hand, social influence process refers to a phenomenon in which an individual's behavior is likely to become more similar to that of her friends over time (Steglich et al., 2006), which suggests that a game player's gaming behavior will become similar to that of her friends over time. Third, I examine players' game choices to see if they exhibit patterns consistent with a choice bandwagon and the influence traditionally ascribed to word-of-mouth. This study looks for evidence that the number of times a game is consumed on a day is influenced by the number of times the game has been consumed previously and by what game players say about the game in posts on Kongregate. In addition, I also examine how the location where information about a game is displayed on the portal site influences the number of times the game is consumed on a given day, and how the effects of word-of-mouth information and the number of times a game has been consumed previously on the number of times the game is consumed on a day vary with where information about the game is displayed on the siteThis dissertation consists of five separate chapters including this introductory chapter. Each of the three studies described above is examined in a separate chapter, from Chapter 2 through 4. The last chapter concludes the dissertation by discussing how the present study can be improved or extended and by identifying important questions, which have not been addressed in this study, that might be examined in the future studies.
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