Measuring the effects of social networking features on player motivation and engagement

Social Networking Services (SNSs) have become a powerful and ubiquitous form of social software with applications in a wide range of fields. Modern SNSs such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter provide functionality for developers to integrate social features into their applications. Game developers have used this to produce highly popular social games, notably ones created by the company Zynga which reports over 240 million monthly active users. Despite the apparent popularity of social games, there exists a lack of scholarly justification for the inclusion of social networking features in games. Nonetheless, game developers operate under the assumption that these features motivate and engage players, and attract new users. Rather than continue this assumption, this study performed an experiment informed by established approaches to examining the effects of motivation and engagement, designed to measure the effects of in-game social networking features on players.