Diffusion dynamics of games on online social networks

Abstract

Social games, being embedded in and drawing upon existing social networks, have the potential to spread virally. In this paper, we examine two popular social games, each having millions of Facebook users, to understand the role that users play individually and collectively in propagating social applications. At the individual level, the users’ invitation behavior significantly outweighs their demographic and social network properties in predicting invitation success rate. At the collective level, we demonstrate that social games that encourage group formation tend to rap-idly integrate dense network cliques. Finally, engagement in a social game is closely tied with the ability to recruit friends. 1.