The Competitiveness of Social Interactions as a Marketing Variable in Social Gaming

Advances in social networking and mobile technology have significantly increased game developers’ ability to actively initiate and manage social interactions between game players. This paper introduces competitiveness as a new attribute of social interactions. We empirically investigate how providing players the opportunity to pursue competitive (win-lose) vs. cooperative (win-win) social interactions differentially affects both individual spending and social network building. Our analysis of real-time logs of a popular social game uncovers an interesting stage-dependent pattern: in the early stage of a social game, competitive interactions encourage more spending in the game, and cooperative interactions lead to a larger social network through interactions with more players. However, as the social game evolves, the opposite results hold: cooperative interactions become more important in motivating spending, and competitive interactions contribute more to social network expansion. These findings indicate that the competitiveness of social interactions can be used as a strategic marketing variable. This paper contributes to the literature on consumer social interaction in general and the literature on game design in particular