Do Social Games Help Us Get Socialized? : Findings that are against common beliefs

Abstract

Social medias such as such as Friendster, CyWorld, and MySpace allow individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others (Ellison, 2008) Social capital broadly refers to the resources accumulated through the relationships among people (Coleman, 1998). Putnam (2000) distinguishes between bridging and bonding social capital: - Bonding social capital: deep relation, strong tie - Bridging social capital: wide relation, weak tie It is possible that new forms of social capital and relationship building will occur in online social network sites (Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe, 2007). Social Game is a social application that can be played in social media. It utilize Open API to use social media information. Some argue that social games strengthen social media friendship via frequent interaction (Alschuler et al., 2004), while others argue that "It’s not really about doing things with them because you’re never playing at the same time (Caldwell, “Blow interview”, 2011/2/15, PC Gamer), and "They’re really just called social games because they run on social networks but they’re way less social." Hence, this study sets out to explore the following two questions: Do social gamers generate more social capital than non-social gamers? Do social game usage impede usage of other functions/services via social media?