Me, Myself and Others: Connecting Player Identification to Gaming Social Capital

This study by Regnath and Elmezeny examines whether player identification predicts gaming social capital among adult German-speaking MMORPG players, arguing that time-based measures of game involvement, such as play frequency, fail to capture the social dynamics that matter in these games. Drawing on van Looy et al.'s multidimensional scale of player identification and Williams' measures of online social capital, the authors position their work as a way to resolve conflicting prior findings in MMORPG research. The theoretical framework distinguishes avatar, group, and game identification and separates bonding social capital, characterized by strong ties, from bridging social capital, characterized by numerous weaker ties.

Survey results from 339 respondents show that player identification correlates strongly and positively with overall gaming social capital (Spearman's ρ = 0.59, p < .001). Avatar identification is associated with bridging capital (ρ = 0.46), while guild identification is associated with bonding capital (ρ = 0.56), supporting the study's main hypotheses and their sub-hypotheses. Identification was also found to predict social capital without significant moderation by gaming experience, so the hypothesis that experience would strengthen this relationship was not supported.

Across the sample, which exceeded 300 German MMORPG players, no significant differences emerged between individual games. The authors conclude that identification and social outcomes are closely interrelated in MMORPGs, but they caution that the sample is non-representative and limited to German speakers, so the findings may not generalize to other cultural or linguistic contexts or to the broader gaming population.