Online Social Gaming and Social Networking Sites

Abstract

Online social games are becoming a significant component in today's social media sites. The social networking sites environment has provided a platform for online games to develop and expand in the virtual medium. Users are now able to play games online, compare scores, and challenge each other among many other things. Due to the diverse user demographics of social media sites, various motivations to playing social games emerge. The need for this present research was to answer the question whether the integration of social games within social networking sites and apps have increased the likelihood of playing those games. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to predict from the fact that will be used to decide whether to include games (Adventure, Fighting, Design\\Art, Virtual Life…etc.) in the social media sites that still have not been implemented (such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc.). Also, we want to discover whether the inclusion of social games has improved the services offered by social sites and whether social gaming has effects on human behavior with regards to socializing and interacting with others. The aim of this study was to examine the relation between social media apps and games, and whether the former has increased users participation in online games. The primary setting for the quantitative method of research study was the online gamers regardless their age, gender, and interests. The data were collected by distributing an online survey, and were analyzed using WEKA data mining tool. Two popular classification algorithms were used to predict the answer of this research question. The resulting data were compared and tested for their accuracy using different metrics.