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 feature-defined influencers had indeed an outsized impact on playtime and social play of players joining their in-game network.