Existing systems: gaming social networks

In order to determine the viability of a gaming social network, we’ll discuss some existing social networks which are targeted at this audience. In this post we’ll focus on identifying what social networks exist for gamers and their features. In a later post, we’ll do case studies of a small selection of those to better understand how they are used.

To draw up a list of social networks, we harvested from web pages that listed social networks for gamers. Typically, these listed 3 or 4, but some listed up to 30. These pages are listed at the bottom of the post.

Following this, we visited each and categorised the features, target audience and features of each.

We tagged the features of each social network based on the following:

• Structural features: How is the social network used? Does it use blogs? Can users have friends?
• Media features: In what ways does the social network encourage discussion on experiences? For example, does it allow commenting, or posting of videos?
• Incentive features: What are extrinsic motivators that attract the audience? Features may include a desktop app, or game news provided to users.

The list below is the result of this categorisation:

To make more sense of this data, we plotted the social networks and their features on an interactive chord diagram, as shown below (mouse over segments to show their connections):

From this, we can see that a large number of these social networks allow sharing of game experience to some degree – by text, pictures or videos.

Editors note: Further analysis can be found here.

Social network listings:

1. GAME ON: Top 5 Social Networks for Gamers
2. The Biggest Social Network No One Is Talking About: Gamers – Buzzfeed
3. 24 Social Networking Site for Gamers – SocialTimes
4. List of social networking websites – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia