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Social Network Dynamics in a Massive Online Game: Network Turnover, Non-densification, and Team Engagement in Halo Reach

Online multiplayer games are a popular form of social interaction, used by hundreds of millions of individuals. However, little is known about the social networks within these online games, or how they evolve over time. Understanding human social dynamics within massive online games can shed new light on social interactions in general and inform the development of more engaging systems. Here, we study a novel, large friendship network, inferred from nearly 18 billion social interactions over 44 weeks between 17 million individuals in the popular online game Halo: Reach. This network is one of the largest, most detailed temporal interaction networks studied to date, and provides a novel perspective on the dynamics of online friendship networks, as opposed to mere interaction graphs. Initially, this network exhibits strong structural turnover and decays rapidly from a peak size. In the following period, however, both network size and turnover stabilize, producing a dynamic structural equilibrium. In contrast to other studies, we find that the Halo friendship network is non-densifying: both the mean degree and the average pairwise distance are stable, suggesting that densification cannot occur when maintaining friendships is costly. Finally, players with greater long-term engagement exhibit stronger local clustering, suggesting a group-level social engagement process. These results demonstrate the utility of online games for studying social networks, shed new light on empirical temporal graph patterns, and clarify the claims of universality of network densification.