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 influencedby social contagion: we do what our network does.Networks often feature particularly influential individuals,commonly called “influencers’.’ Existing work suggests thatin-game social networks in online games are similar to reallifesocial networks in many respects. However, we do notknow whether there are in-game equivalents to influencers.We therefore applied standard social network features usedto identify influencers to the online multiplayer shooter TomClancy’s The Division. Results show that network featuredefinedinfluencers had indeed an outsized impact on playtimeand social play of players joining their in-game network