Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game
This work provides insights into online player communities for researchers and game developers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new dataset.
The study analyzed over 1 million tweets related to the online game Destiny using unsupervised clustering and topic modeling to profile user groups and correlate Twitter activity with playtime for over 3,000 players, identifying distinct player subgroups and community topics.
Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling. Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and uncovering broad topics of community interest.