Social networking services have brought a revolution in life and socialization. Each user created on these platforms has their own communication, sharing, and entertainment applications, and they have begun to be physically and emotionally replaced. More and more people are always sitting in a chair, spaced on a computer or mobile device. This has resulted not only in games and applications that allow people to connect with those around them and to improve and enrich their bonds, but also in the person ceasing to move in life and being satisfied with a virtual life. This emotional impact is due to the great feedback we receive when we share with others (even part of it). There are also many reasons for this. For example, when a person who plays a game shares their gaming experience with friends, they are expected to talk about the game mentioned and stop playing the game. We have not stopped contacting our friends and displaying them.

1.1. Background of Second Sight Game

Furthermore, the Second Sight community also provides a comprehensive set of forums covering major mission elements, emergency notices, game support, and player initiation-selection. With rich resources, these forums attracted many exchanges of messages, such as posts about experiences, suggestions, and question-answering phenomena, from July 2003 to June 2004. By analyzing the posting records, some important insights emerged. First, the major in-game systems of this game are equipped with distinct online communities. Players use these communities for the purposes of sharing knowledge, seeking support, and creating values. Second, the experience and relational actions during online gameplay are the main factors contributing to subsequent recommendations of mission recruiting and co-player selection. Third, formal incentives such as ranking and missions with moderate difficulties are the primary factors contributing to the posting activities in the gameplay environment under investigation. We view these insights as the preliminary outcome of several research questions important to both practice and academia.

Second Sight is a real-time role-playing and strategy game with more than 12,000 missions in which players can demonstrate real-world knowledge and skills such as designing liposome-encapsulated drugs, driving, networking, and forensic investigation. It has been used in various informative classes in game studies, which integrate different disciplines from art to engineering. This game has a large population of players with distinct backgrounds. In the online message boards of Second Sight, participants engage themselves in providing help and support through building knowledge structures, including game strategy, player creature location, and social connections. Sometimes, players ask questions such as how to finish a difficult mission, and the answers usually come from experienced players. At other times, experienced users may ask for the latest detailed information about the game, such as announcements of new versions and maintenance break schedules. Due to its good merits in handling game complexity, value creation, and popularity, we regard it as a simple case to explore the impact of online communities on player recommendations.

1.2. Significance of Player Recommendations

Online communities are environments for players to share interests, ideas, experience, stories, and comments, and to help each other solve exploration problems and answer questions. Because the competition of online communities in computer-based games is high, most game service providers support community interfaces to build their own online community environments. Player recommendations are also high-quality community activities. The simplicity and easiness to understand of player recommendations can help more groups of players to recognize with better acceptance. At the same time, making recommended items according to user and item ratings, player recommendations from an individual game player are wiser. They can be realized by using collaborative filtering in Recommendation System technique that helps the passive decomposition discovery of network players according to passive coordination of system learning, recognizing the network games, and actively participating in system objects. The purpose is to provide players with a deep practice engagement and faster social discovery of game skills and experiences. The problem of Second Sight used to explore many problems is that our passive user behavior data are important information about recommenders for game service providers. But what types of influence or differences need to be highlighted in order to develop and pay attention to the game popularity? How to evaluate the relevance of recommendations in quality of help?

2. Literature Review

The fraction of friends another user in the community interacts with higher, the more recommended similar game information is the game other user information. In the implementation, we designed a module named HasFriends. Given a seed and a social network, we can get all the friends of the seed by breadth-first search. When the user joins the online social network of game players, we have set the module in the game community forum according to user recommendation on the operation. The game player uses this recommended system as a way of network using information exchange to trust other users and commit to help. The gaming behavior of individual users is obtained according to the angle of passion achievement. We combed through the exchange of data accessed between game products and social user pages. From the side of cooperative recommendation, while the recommendation algorithm cannot directly obtain the emotional requirements of users, users will discuss their interests and hobbies with their friends in the community. Moreover, the recommendation information category preference of the users in the recommendation phase is based on data categories from the social network. On further linking the information of the final user recommendation game with the user’s friends, we needed to repeat the recommendation process for the users who shared the user’s friends. The characteristics of the community in the game user are used mixedly. The technique of employing collaborative recommendation increases the degree of user satisfaction with the recommendation result in a community-based recommendation environment.

In online communities for games, people often discuss their favorite games, share experiences with games, seek help to overcome the difficulties associated with games, and meet like-minded players to play games with. These kinds of opinions, emotions, and interactions may be a very good measure of gaming interest, which could potentially impact game recommendations. To reduce the objectivity of recommendation algorithms, we added the social data of users in the process of making game player recommendations and focused on the difference of recommendation algorithms affected by a user’s social data and player preferences.

Currently, recommendation algorithms might be based upon affinity-based techniques or collaborative filtering. But, the main problem with these techniques is that they do not take into account the possible interests of individuals in contributing to communication or social experiences. The growing popularity of online communities offers the opportunity to mine valuable information about social events and activities from people’s own conversations. Therefore, we chose to explore the influence of players’ social community on game recommendations, as social community is a significant piece of people’s online experience and reflects interests and interaction patterns starting from individual opinions, emotions, and experiences.

2.1. Online Gaming Communities

Since the release of Second Life, there certainly has been a lot of discussion concerning the effects these virtual worlds are expected to have on the business world. By using some of the most powerful aspects of Second Life, we can replicate services and items we currently obtain in the third dimension. This benefits the user, but specifically, it makes behavior more selective towards certain experiences. Since virtual worlds place value and service on experiences, it validates calling a virtual world a service industry. Data provided within these virtual worlds and Second Life show time depletion problems involving mutually inconsistent inter-temporal information. Intuitive logic dictates that this problem vacillates between a market failure and an inefficiency.

Virtual worlds offer a considerably diverse range of experiences to their millions of subscribers. With such rich potential experiences, people use shared perception systems to validate the viability of physical systems through technology acceptance, particularly when uncertainty is present. These experiences are viable due to their residents, avatars, and meticulously constructed economies. These virtual worlds have withstood the rigors of time and user growth while delivering valuable lessons on innovation by creating a second generation of virtual worlds. The most famous virtual world is Linden Labs’ Second Life.

2.2. Player Recommendations in Gaming

The exploration of online communities where players regularly exchange opinions or criticisms of games and actively provide game recommendations has not been seen in any investigations. The regulars in these online communities admirably act as intermediaries, providing first-hand information to players searching for games. These online communities, including game beginners, core players, those with a devoted role, and sensational players, constitute a community of players in particular genres and have extremely high expansion and knowledge. In these online communities, challenges, task difficulty, game resources, game skills, and professional knowledge can be accessed and exchanged while playing a game. The introduction of game experience in the player community has become critical and creates an interaction that establishes data sharing related to game playing.

Exchanging and delivering game recommendations or reviews is still considered a significant intention between players of computer games worldwide. It is also deemed to be the player’s inherent right to play the video game that suits them most, whether involuntarily, voluntarily, or steered by the player themselves. In previous studies related to game functions, criteria, or user preferences of games, much effort has been made to improve the efficiency of recommendations. However, no effort could be found to evaluate if the targeted game was exactly what the player wishes to play. Therefore, game knowledge is clustered and ambiguous, and players rely solely on past gaming experiences or limited exploration of a game’s presentation strategy.

3. Methodology

Facebook data and game data are gathered from the official Second Sight game. The official Second Sight game generates game data to understand the possible relationship between data and game recommendations. This information will be shared with the Facebook data, which will form the dataset used to measure the relationship between relationships.

At the beginning of the task, the salient properties of the data were shown to respondents, and then the respondents were asked to build a profile of their relationship with each listed Facebook friend. In this process, as much information as possible, including salient properties, that respondents provide to understand game ratings from relationships was attributed.

The posts have the meanings of the words rated by themselves. To a certain extent, respondents of their own relationships recommend the Second Sight game to their Facebook friends in their words, and then rate the player’s words to help the research.

In order to gather the data, the researcher created a public group on Facebook to collect the recommendations of this group’s members on the game. A screenshot was sent to the group using the Timeline view of the Second Sight game. Afterward, three open-ended questions were asked: What kind of game do you think this game is? What do you think of the game? Is it worth playing?

3.1 Data Collection

3.1. Data Collection Techniques

Discussion quality was enhanced because players had experienced the game first hand, so most of the discussions were of high quality. Finally, a multidisciplinary approach was used to describe variables to accurately represent research factors. These actions allowed the satisfaction and needs of the group to be observed in ways that are otherwise difficult and conclude that user role has an effect on the player’s recommendation during game exploration. Results led to the implications mentioned earlier.

Data was collected through the PbP mechanism. Characteristics of the player profiles and ease of recommendation in Second Sight game were measured to examine the satisfaction of the group’s needs. Threads and comments contributed by the nine communities were also collected with the help of transcription methods and analyzed before they were eventually coded, summarized and analyzed with the aid of descriptive statistics. Such content-focused collection mechanism also helped to serve as smoothen data reduction and/or summarization processes. Discussions across various threads were also explored to observe and note interesting themes that emerged during these various conversations.

3.2. Analysis of Player Recommendations

The basic modeling problem is to capture the impact of online communities, such as those in Xfire, on player recommendations. Let G = (V,E) be a contact graph representing our current knowledge of the recommender system. A subset H of V will represent a mutual fan club whose members are players that play multiple games with a preference for each other. We define the Fan Club Inducing Graph as the subgraph (H,E’) induced by H and its edge set E’ as the set of edges that are also in G. We argue that we should expect high relative recommendation impact among players in H but not among players outside of H, and we measure this relative impact using the modulus of E’ in G. By crafting a measure of relative impact, we are able to uncover suggestions that go beyond spotlighting the players with the most friends. Our contribution is that we successfully deploy a recommendation analysis that is based on intriguing graph structures, obtained without the need to input initial lists of high score players. With a goal of recommendation based purely on the topology of played together, we highlight sets of individuals from the built network that exhibit interest for one another. In light of the popular press observations that online communities are tailored to personal interests, our interesting graph structures present a suggestive way of identifying matches between communities of mutual players. With knowledge of these possible matches, systems can concentrate on using content and ranking methods that are able to deliver higher quality recommendations to all the restricted communities. This technique offers a way to offer users better finely graded recommendations within the cold start problem.

We explain how we determine the set of recommended players for a specific player. To understand the role of online communities on player recommendation, it is important to focus on the external systems that mutual players share. This allows us to craft a novel feature that measures the relative impact of the common online subscribers for any player pair. We then deploy network techniques to identify interesting structures in the set of players in the recommender graph.

4. Results and Findings

The analysis of the threads carried out was very informative and interesting. The game has an impact on player recommendations for post-game actions. 360 of the threads were non-influential. In the threads, the comments reinforce the influence of the game and the possibility of future relationships when forming a new group based on the participants of the current group. They are analyzed from Table 3 to Table 6 in the forum dataset. After analyzing these two datasets, we realized that we created four groups within the game: high, cooperative, high, limited, low, low, and non-cooperative. From these four groups that interacted with each other and with the game elements, they managed to construct 10 sub-groups to perform the challenges. There were also repetitive players who participated in several groups, showing how rich the interaction becomes and the popularity of players and the game.

4.2 Findings

We have analyzed the players’ replies to understand the construction of the groups. They were also a way to analyze how we can form other groups with groups we played with in the past. This analysis is essential after we interviewed the game designer who said that the different player conversations are essential for the game to grow. This result means that the game will have been carried out in a way that players can relate and generate ideas for future cases based on previous experiences. This finding was also corroborated by the comments of players who took part in the game and were divided into two groups in the posts. From Table 7, it is observed that the total number of data collected. From the answers of group 5 and group 6, no positive construction of the group was observed and no comments on the data.

4.1 Analysis of Groups

4.1. Overview of Online Community Interactions

Baym claims the use of online community, providing a critical setting for popular culture, a primary venue for public life, and an increasingly important form of social organization. Many popular social circles have produced one or more online communities serving their circles. For example, online sports news, online bilingual news forums, online service networks, and basketball information-rich websites produced by the US basketball superstar for communication, passing and interacting efficiently with their fans, with the purpose of increasing the revenue of basketball stars coming from each game. Corresponding to the circle of a prominent network of reporters force or fans, online communities are various kinds of forms. This chapter is using Baym’s viewpoint to describe how netizens use the Second Sight online community to pass the potential related information to help their peers or recommend the game to others.

The communication, interactions, and relationships among geographically dispersed individuals are mediated through social relationships. The most recent developments of communication technologies have given a new perspective on computer-mediated communication, especially in affecting various aspects of culture, social, and business interaction. According to Baym, there are four types of online communities including communities, personal use, veterans, and commercial organizations. In communities, everyone is allowed to represent and discuss, especially tackling specific topics. Everyone in digital words can get a conversation with the US President only via email. They can know whether a public figure or a basketball star dies immediately via the online newspaper. Online information technology breaks the spatial and temporal constraints easily. What kind of social phenomenon results from network news reports, interaction between people in virtual communities, especially whether it presents real behavior and social relationships, is a hot topic.

4.2. Key Factors Influencing Player Recommendations

Previous research shows that from the perspective of the top-selling games of all time, such as Medal of Honor, Battlefield 1942, and Call of Duty, the first-person shooter game has always been very successful in the game market, and the reason is closely related to the exciting elements contained in its core gameplay. Especially due to the highly immersive nature of games, these elements have been interpreted as «genuine» experiences, and in the virtual game world, players have to face the game plot instead of just listening and watching. From the value chain of external links discussed in Section 3.1, while only considering the connection between players and the main specific game, the author believes that the value of identification-oriented and life-creation-oriented core gameplay offers key support. In summary, online communities should be active after the game developer has finished the production process of the entire game, while the expected experience drivers develop across the product development process should effectively promote the player’s excitement and passion for the game.

As illustrated by findings in exploratory data analysis, the key factors influencing the impact of gameplay experience on online communities are the features of core gameplay, as well as the impression of visual and audio effects or game AV. Among them, in the game design stage of Second Sight, gameplay experience is not only a relevant consideration for developers but also an important influence factor that contributes to the success of public support captured from marketing communications. As an important part of Second Sight game, the core gameplay connects the game and the player, and the development of core gameplay should always run through the entire game creation process. Once players find it difficult to get sensory stimulation from it, then the other features of Second Sight will lose their importance and become empty and without significance.

5. Discussion

Second Sight’s player-based genre reflector (solution-submission interface) insulated us from exposure to any of the relevant games because of a feature where displayed games would not be those that players had previously obtained a set of more than 50% of.

Since none of these solutions exist prior to the end of 1992, players had to have completed the game to produce a rating of it. Second Sight, which allows players to both acquire a mystery adventure game and provide ratings of such games in less than an hour via a solution, replaced the need to consult with the collective wisdom of players via a web forum. The players who were unaware of online communities for adventure games interpreted their ratings as indicative of the fact that they were highly skilled at discovering these gem-like games.

While our enthusiasm initially translated into novel gameplay insights through our analysis of players’ data, Second Sight’s players’ performance met their needs/requirements for a mystery adventure game in less than one hour. Our initial strategy was to count the ratings of adventure games often referenced as favorites on various web forums as providing the collective message deemed by these solution-seeking players.

AIGE (2005) Challenge Workshop First Place Winner; Rated «Best of Show» and Overall Best Educational Game ITEC Conference, 2007; Honorable Mention for Software at Future Play 2007; Placement in the Top 30 of the MobyGames Classics List

As Dewey argues, an artifact has significance as an experience (instrumental) artifact when it can satisfy wants/needs, and otherwise becomes an ordinary artifact. Second Sight was designed to provide fans of the Mystery House or first generation adventure games an opportunity to be able to play another such game without the need of having to abandon their modern day video game playing habits. Throughout our pilot test, Second Sight successfully demonstrated this instrumental artifact concept.

5.1. Implications for Game Developers

The analysis of possible game modifications made through discussions within the online community should provide game developers with insights and knowledge to recommend game development to producers, aligning with the players. After the beta-test is closed, developers can aggregate the community’s discussions to see a variety of influences and implications that emerged from the online community. The recommendations given by the community can vary widely and cover high-level tips for improving the gaming experience, as well as lower-level game mechanics such as balance, maps, bugs, and connections. Producers must know how and when to collect, analyze, and use community recommendations to receive the best indication of potential demand.

Online communities participating in Second Sight can provide ideas for new games that may be interesting to potential players. The community functions as a filter for the variety of games, releasing only the most relevant information. For this reason, the community can serve as a source of recommendations for developers. The main problem for game developers is the difficulty of adapting to the structure of the subsequent game, which will depend on the presentation by the community and their requests or interests.

5.2. Future Research Directions

Our fundamental commitment is to preserve the description of details that make up the experience without biased framing that affects how narration is advanced. We can clearly see the candor and the range of themes in players’ narratives while we present the information to external observations. There are still other dimensions of players’ participation that we do not cover in this study. The social nature is one of these dimensions – who the players dialogued with and how that contributed to reflections are instances that, if understood in detail, could contribute towards a perspective that allows small groups of players to reflect in more intuitive and meaningful settings related to ethical and critical issues surrounding Second Sight.

Through a pilot study that engaged the players and interacted with a gameless approach, our experience was challenged, and alternative ideas for possible improvements on available techniques or even entirely new methods were proposed by the users. We end this chapter by returning our attention to several design issues that arose and by pointing to some possible research implications that stem from our strategy. Foremost, our future strategy should involve prompting reflection and developing a better understanding of how particular styles and types of reflection are most conducive to invoking truths and authentic participation in interpretative judgments enabled by them.

6. Conclusion and Recommendations

Results demonstrated the player typology and play activities framework and suggested that imaginative play activities support the credibility of old players in the community, whereas the initial experience is suggested to help both new players and developers, due to varied levels of experience shared between old players. As a result, imaginative versus credible willingness for players to offer different types of recommended advice in a specific area was shaped by game presentation as well as game community infrastructure which enables diverse positive emotional ties to maintain the variety of audience and promote the broader base of game appeal.

In this research, we attempted to study how the use of online communities and word-of-mouth communication can affect the player experiences and the word-of-mouth communication in physical game products. The study was conducted with content analysis in order to determine if players’ experiences could be shaped and redirected by the shared discussions of past players, friends and acquaintances or other potential users. Our intention was to discover various types of players and share findings to allow game designers to design games that appeal to these player behaviors. Furthermore, by exploring these findings in depth, game designers can develop a synergy between games and user interactions.

6.1. Summary of Key Findings

The findings have several implications for both research and practice. In the research field, most of the previous studies on the effect of online communities focus only on games that were explicitly designed to support online communities. In contrast, this research considers a larger market share of games. Despite the fact that educational and serious games aim to guide players to learn in a predefined and controlled manner, motivation and engagement have significant impacts in these games. Therefore, it is useful to further study the impact of online communities on player recommendations in different types of games, such as casual games, educational games, and serious games.

This chapter discusses the key findings of the proposed approach and study, investigating the factors that may affect the way online communities affect player recommendations in games. Major findings of this research show that a positive relationship exists between online communities and player recommendations for games and that the presence factor has more influence on player recommendations than either content factors or temporal factors. It is also found that the social presence factor has more influence on player recommendations than either emotional presence factors or co-presence.

6.2. Practical Recommendations for Game Developers

The findings of this study provide practical suggestions for game designers to promote these recommendations by incorporating features that promote community development and engagement in the game design. The second approach offers a clear recovery for game developers, but in order to achieve the return, the developers must be willing to invest in terms of game development. This work contributes to the game community with important recommendations for its participants by analyzing how the SOS game community facilitated its development in categories.

The primary role of a recommender system is to assist users in finding good suggestions using software tools. This research is aimed at providing recommendations to the game developers themselves, which indicate innovations for strengthening the game’s community. To further enhance this final product, it is important to consider this feedback during iterative stages of product development. Therefore, due to human social behavior, games are developed to be played and shared with consumers. This additional feature of games distinguishes them from other technological innovations. They can intentionally act as mediators between their customers, or, if permitted, gather customer opinions and display them in a high-cost area.

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