Using Social Media Interactions for Personalization and Adaptation in Digital Games
Key: Kon14-1
Author: Johannes Konert
Date: April 2014
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: Academic Conferences International
Book title: Proceedings of the 1st European Conference on Social Media ECSM 2014
Keywords: Social Serious Games, Game Influencing, Social Media Interactions, Participation, Adaptation, Personalization
Abstract: Most digital games connected to social media platforms tend to use the platform as information channel (for viral marketing primarily). Therefore only limited interaction patterns exist to allow the flow of user-generated content from the social media platforms into the game play. Still, this does not only allow innovative new ways of personalization for game play experience, but also raises research questions about how user experience can be enhanced by the surrounding social network of the current game player. Additionally, activation of the ego-network to attend votes, contribute content and participate (partly) in the game can be used as a marketing channel. This is especially of interest for serious games that usually have only limited budgets. This paper provides insight into the Game Adaptation Model of the SoCom.KOM middleware solution that allows the use of social media data, metrics and interactions for game personalization and adaptation. The paper presents the prototype of a 3D adventure game that is connected to users of a social media application via SoCom.KOM. The evaluation results highlight the raised acceptance of players for social media publishing by the game instance and the acceptance of social media users to participate in the published prompts for participation and content contribution.

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