A Community Success Model for Gaming [630232]

A Community Success Model for Gaming
Communities

Yiwei Cao, Anna Glukhova, Ralf Klamma, and Dominik Renzel
Informatik 5, RWTH Aachen University , Ahornstr. 55, D-52056 Aachen, Germany
Email: {cao,glukhova,klamma,r enzel}@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Abstract – Community satisfaction has become a
crucial aspect for success of emerging multimedia
information systems. For measuring community
satisfaction we propose a community success model
(CSM) based on the seminal DeLone & McLean IS
Success Model. CSM combines quantitative data collected
through automatic monitoring of service usage with
qualitative extracted from automatically generated
questionnaires. As proof of concept we propose to apply
our CSM to evaluate innovative community supporting
services created within our regular lab course “Gaming
Communities” at RWTH Aachen University. Video
gaming is part of our new me dia culture, entertaining
people of all ages. The satisfaction of gaming community members can influence the success of a game and
therefore presents a relevant object of investigation for
CSM.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, communities of practice [21] as well as
social networks [3], [7], [8] rapidly shape diverse
communities on different scales, ranging from small niche groups to hundreds of millions of users. Among
them, gaming communities emerge and have massive
evolvements. Computer games have become prevalent entertainment in our today’s life. A 60 page-long report
of a survey conducted lately by PEW/Internet shows
that computer games become an essential life element
of all teens in the USA [15]. The human desire for
playing online and video games creates a booming
market of gaming consoles (e.g. Wii, Xbox, PS3),
handheld consoles (e.g. PSP, Nintendo DS), a big
variety of online games (e.g World of Warcraft and GuildWars) and virtual worlds (e.g. SecondLife).
Consequently, gamers build up gaming communities to
share experiences, since th e communication is vitally
important for the community existence [13], [16], [18],
[24].
Community support is important for both game
development and community building [1]. Firstly, in most of today’s online games players have to solve
problems as a group, which implies the need for communication among members, requires engines for
group building, etc. Secondly, Lehnhart et al. [15]
report that close to 50% of US teenagers play online
games with people they know in their offline lives.
Community support can allow integration of offline
friend circles into online communities. Thirdly, community services enhance competition within
games, which builds up customer loyalty as a
consequence. Obviously, games and gaming communities are strongly intertwined and experience
permanent co-development.
In principal, gaming communities make use of
synchronous as well as asynchronous communication techniques. On the one hand, gamers can leave an
asynchronous message to the community. Gamers discuss new game features, argue about problems they
encounter at playing, give and seek advice about
gaming strategies via forums, wikis, blogs and social networking sites (e.g. www.wow-europe.com,
www.gamingwelt.com/, and www.wiiinsider.de). On
the other hand, all modern games provide direct in-game communication, such as built-in chat modules
support, team building, strate gy discussions, etc. Thus,
communication is not restricted to a simple message exchange, but also involves further service
functionality. For example, in WOW players can trade goods like special items, weapons, gold, etc.
(www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/trading.html).
It is essential to desi gn a successful community
structure in online multiplayer games [8].
However, the design of successful virtual
communities is a challenging process. Due to the huge variety of both gaming devices and game concepts, no
universal community support strategy is possible.
Moreover, new requirements for context-based services for gaming communities come up with next-generation
mobile applications, which are featured as accessing
multimedia anywhere at anytime with low-cost handsets, systems and charges, but high data
transmission rates.
Besides well-known technical success factors (e.g.
efficiency, stability, etc.), community satisfaction is a crucial aspect to meas ure success of community
information systems. Thus, success measures are not
only stakeholder but also system dependent [16]. Based
on conventional IS success models such as the DeLone
and McLean (D & M) IS Success Model [5], we
propose a community success model (CSM) to analyze
requirements and evaluate the success of community
information systems. Community satisfaction
measurement is carried out in terms of community
factors, system ubiquity, a nd user mobility. In short,
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community success is based on user satisfaction and
participation. Wenger concludes the characteristics of
Communities of Practice (CoP) [21] as Joint Enterprise
(JE), Mutual Engagement (ME), and Shared
Repositories (SR), which are in line with the following community aspects by Whittaker et al. [22]. They can
be well applied to building up gaming communities as
follows:

• A shared goal or interest that provides the reason for being a part of the community (JE): gamers’ similar goals to play and win games;
• Shared activities between members (ME), here between gamers;
• Intense interactions and strong ties (ME), esp.
important for online multiplayer games;
• Support between community members (ME) also for online multiplayer games;
• Access to shared resources (SR) such as gaming
forums etc.;
• Social conventions, languages, or protocols (SR) are associated with the context of gaming communities.

In terms of mutual engagement of communities and
shared repositories based on certain social conventions,
a common cultural background plays an important role.
It can be reflected by the spatiotemporal distribution of
gamers. Hence, time and location monitoring of
communities shows joint activities and interactions among gamers. Gaming community satisfaction can be
measured by assessing whet her these aspects are well
covered.
To explore the concept, we employed the proposed
CSM to evaluate gaming community satisfaction
within our regular lab course “Gaming Communities”. During the course, students were asked to develop
value-added gaming community oriented services,
which requires the assessmen t of community needs and
interests in advance.
CSM has been used to evaluate the success of
multimedia community services through automatic monitoring of service reques ts and the presentation of
online questionnaires as proof of concept.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In
Section 2 we introduce the idea and settings of our lab
course “Gaming Communities” to launch starting
points of communities and community satisfaction. The
student projects are introdu ced in Section 3 as case
studies. The design of CSM is introduced in Section 4.
Section 5 illustrates the evaluation scenario of using
CSM to analyze gaming communities. Finally, section
6 provides a summary and presents our ongoing research work and open issues.
II.
THE ANATOMY OF GAMING COMMUNITIES
We provide an insight into gaming communities
through our regular lab course “Gaming
Communities”, held by Information Systems at RWTH Aachen University in summer terms. This lab aims at prototyping of value-added services for gaming
community support. Every pa rticipant has to prepare a
one-page expose about his/her ideas. At the beginning of the semester, the three best proposals are selected as
projects to be fulfilled and students are divided in three
groups accordingly. During th e rest of the semester, an
iterative process beginning from the identification of
community needs and ending with the community tests
of the implemented tools is performed. The results of each process step are reflected in four reviews.
In our lab, we give participants leeway in the
selection of devices and ga mes for their projects. The
lab is equipped with different kinds of consoles: Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony PS3, Sony
PSP, iPhones and Nokia smart phones of the N95
series. All of these platforms have online access.
For each of them we provide a software
development kit (SDK), available for studying purpose and non-commercial use. For example, to develop on Nintendo Wii a Wii browser called “Internet Channel”
[9,19] can be used. Internet Channel is an Opera-based
browser, for which, like for any other browser,
JavaScript application can be created. In contrast to
programming with JavaScript for Wii, applications for
the Xbox can be developed with Visual C#. The XNA
Game Studio Express is an Xbox SDK especially
designed for non-professional game production (www.xbox.com/en-US/dev/default.htm). The situation
with the Sony PS3 differs fr om its competitors, because
PS3 is already equipped with a Yellow Dog Linux
operating system. This allows a huge range for
homebrew applications to be developed and is entirely
sanctioned by Sony.

Figure 1. Mobile gaming devices
Investigation of gaming communities formed around
the big variety of mobile gaming device (Figure 1) players are also the task of our lab. For mobile gaming
development we suggest the use of the Sun Java
Wireless Toolkit (WTK). WTK is a state-of-the-art
toolbox for developing wireless applications based on the J2ME Connected Limited Device Configuration
(CLDC) [10] and Mobile Information Device Profile
(MIDP) [11]. Applications developed with WTK run
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on all compliant cell phones, mainstream personal
digital assistants, and other small mobile devices. The
toolkit includes an emulation environment,
performance monitoring and optimization features as
well as documentation and examples for developers to
demonstrate how to quickly deliver efficient and
successful wireless applications to market
(http://java.sun.com/products/sjwtoolkit/).
Solely the knowledge about available programming
tools for game development is clearly not enough for the creation of gaming community information systems. Besides their tech nical realization the most
challenging part is an in-depth analysis of gaming communities about their needs and desires. In order to help our students to collect this knowledge, several
activities are carried out. In the introductory meeting
we explain the meaning of the general community term followed by a round-table discussion among students
and supervisors about gaming communities and their
needs. As the gaming experience of all participants varies from professional to casual gamers, many
different opinions are usually expressed and different
needs emphasized. Thus, the students get an
opportunity to learn the subject from different points of
view, which is essential considering the diversity of existing gaming communities. The two successful
community oriented projects “Nintendo DS Mixed-
reality Treasure Hunt” [17] and “MyGLife” [23] are presented in the same meeting as case studies.
Furthermore, during the course several lectures and
invited talks on communities and game development contribute to the expansion of the student’s knowledge
of the gaming world. The next step, which should help
students to understand the gaming community’s desires, is to provide weekly gaming sessions in our
lab. Besides the development and programming tasks,
students are also required to present their results to convince the audience of their achievements (see
Figure 2).

Figure 2. Gaming Community lab final presentation
Obviously, many different community oriented
services and features in games already exist on the
market. In our lab we are looking for innovative ideas. Therefore a thorough market study has to be performed by the lab participants. For information exchange the
Basic Support of Cooper ative Work (BSCW) [2]
system is used.
III.
CASE STUDIES OF GAMING COMMUNITIES
At the beginning of summer term 2008, students
proposed projects with a wide coverage. Topics included e-Sport support, universal Player versus
Player (PvP) /Player with Player (PwP) platforms, massively multiplayer online role-playing game
(MMORPG) communities, etc. Three clusters were
identified within over ten projects and taken over by
three student groups. During the semester, 3 groups of
students worked on 3 projects respectively: Civilization
IV – Conquer the New World (G1), Babel: PvP/ PwP on iPhones (G2), and empirical research on gaming
communities (G3).

G1 has identified that many multiplayer gamers have difficulties in finding appropriate opponents. Often,
players differ in their abilities, interests etc. To find
adequate opponents, the students developed a community website where pl ayers can register for
Civilization IV multiplayer matches. How well a player integrates into a particular match setting is determined
by an algorithm based on the analysis of player abilities and preferences. Four di mensions are taken into
account. Age, winning strategy, experience and game scenario are combined as a weighted sum. The result is represented in the order in which the matches are
presented to the user. In order to improve the
comparability of match results, the students created their own Civilization IV scenario based on the
conquest and colonization of America between 1500
and 1850.
G2 called their project Ba bel which targets mobile
Apple iPhone gaming communities . The enlarged
screen display, multimodality of touch screen, and the lately released built-in GPS-localization functionality
of iPhones have attracted the communities of both
gaming developers and the gaming players. However, until now gamer community support is quite limited.
Babel helps players to locate and communicate with
nearby players. A chat tool on the iPhone was
developed, using Apple’s service discovery protocol
“Bonjour”. Player communities are supported through internal communication management and automated
comparison of installed games within community etc.
The results have been presented on the official iPhone
SDK emulator.
G3 found that gaming has undergone a transition from
a niche hobby to a part of everyday culture, with the
most prominent examples of professional gaming in
Korea and the success of World of Warcraft. This
transition alongside with th e advance of Internet use
has created a new kind of social environment,
commonly known as virtual life. The students have
created an online survey at www.gamingrealities.net for investigation of those gaming environments with
particular regard to the interaction between gaming and
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career, relationships as well as social groups. The
answers of 837 participants worldwide were
statistically analyzed an d published in [6].

Figure 3. Gaming Community Lab results for the Community
Success Model
All projects G1, G2 and G3 can be divided in two
categories (cf. Figure 3). G1 and G2 focused on the
creation of community supporting services, G3 on an
empirical research on gaming communities.
Community satisfaction with the services developed within both projects G1 and G2 presents an interesting
object of investigation as it can reflect the success of
these innovations. At the same time, the information collected from empirical research on gaming
communities helps to understand and interpret results
gained from measuring community satisfaction based on the CSM.
IV.
DESIGN OF THE COMMUNITY SUCCESS MODEL
(CSM)
Invention does not directly imply success. If nobody
has implemented an idea before, there is still a chance, that there is actually no need for it. In his investigation
on multiplayer online role-playing games Yee [24]
found out three essential factors for the gamers: achievement, social and immersion. The social
community oriented factor is subdivided in socializing
(casual chat, helping others, making friends), relationship (personal, self-disclosure, find and give
support) and teamwork (collaboration, groups, group
achievement). Despite all concrete examples from the Yee model listed above, a choice of items to adopt for
certain gaming community needs to be performed.
Such decisions are normally based on personal experience and assumptions. At that point the
usefulness of CSM becomes obvious. In general, the
measurement of community information system success requires a reliable and valid model. Therefore,
a number of model aspects must be clarified in
advance. Existing success models with respective dimensions and factors were surveyed. While
designing CSM, we also had the following questions in
mind: How can measures be classified? Which scales should be used? How will data be obtained/stored for
individual measures? What techniques can be used to
analyze/improve/validate CSM quality?
System
Quality
Information
QualityUse
User
SatisfactionIndividual
ImpactCommunity
Impact

Figure 4. The D&M IS Success Model (adapted from [5])
The DeLone & McLean IS Success Model [5] (cf.
Figure 4) has been identified as a well-established success model due to the fact that its validity was proven by many independent empirical studies. In this
model, all IS success factor s are categorized into six
dimensions. System quality and information quality
affect use and user satisfaction, which lead to the
individual and even organizational impact. Thus, it
seemed acceptable to adopt all six dimensions from the
original model, and to choose an appropriate subset of
related factors for each dimension, as it is recommended by the authors. However, the original
model definitely lacks certain factors that characterize
current information system s with respect to the
partially interrelated concepts multimedia and mobility .
Although mentioned impl icitly with the success
dimension Organizational Impact, success factors of CoPs are not pointed out explicitly. CSM is the result
of the model building process by extending the D&M
IS Success Model by current concepts and customizing
to gaming community information systems.
Based on our previous research on MobSOS [12], a
testbed for mobile multimedia community services, we constructed the CSM model in the following way. The
first step consisted of a cer tain process of preselecting
success factors and possibly augmenting and
restructuring a transformed list resulting from this first
step. The next step was to cl assify and design measures
for each of the success factors as well as to find appropriate means of obtaini ng them. However, before
actually starting the design process it was inevitable to
become clear about mode l building and validation
techniques to be used.
If the causal interrelationships between individual
dimensions are neglected in order to simplify the
representation, the model structure can be reduced to
the taxonomy as depicted in Figure 5. The complete model is thereby decomposed into the following six
overall success dimensions: System Quality (SQ),
Information Quality (IQ), Use (U), User Satisfaction (US), Individual Impact (II), and Community Impact
(CI) (renamed from Or ganizational Impact).
Each dimension is made up of a set of factors, and each
factor is represented by a set of proxy measures. Table
I provides a complete overview of all factors to be
covered. In this straight taxonomy, the CSM success
dimensions constitute the first level elements, where
the only difference to the original D & M IS Success
Model [5] is the dimension name “Community Impact”
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Figure 5. The Community Success Model – Taxonomy of
Dimensions, Factors and Measures
instead of “Organizational Impact” . Second-level
elements represent individual factors of the respective
success dimensions. Finally, third-level ele-ments
represent proxy measures captured in the context of a
given factor of a specific success dimension. They are
considered as important aspects to measure the overall success of gaming community systems, including
community satisfaction.
We describe a process aiming at combining well
established universal and rather modern success factors
specific to the three concepts communities , multimedia
and mobility , in order to create the CSM as a compact,
however comprehensive success model for gaming community services. The main tasks to be performed are the following:

• Reduction of initial comprehensive list of
success factors from th e literature survey
• Augmentation of reduced list by missing
crucial factors
• Disambiguation of individual success factors
by appropriate renaming
• Definition of measures for all success factors
Initial point was a marginally modified version of a
list of success factors contai ning 145 success factors
including traditional factors from [5] as well as current factors from more recent wo rk e.g. [4], [14]. This
initial list was then reduced according to the relevance
grades for overall services success, applicability to
updated usage, clarity in meaning, accessibility and
computability, and acquisition with a minimal number of unambiguous items.
In detail, in some cases it was possible to cause
reduction by merging factors with similar meanings (e.g. “Currency” and “Timeliness”). Some of the
factors were renamed to prohibit disambiguation for a better understanding.
Table I presents the results from the aforementioned
process with regard to community IS success
measurement. All factors are related to the dimensions
Use, User Satisfaction, Individual Impact, and
Community Impact respectively, which can be mapped
to the three principal characteristics of communities of
practice. Community information system success can be proved by observing community evolution, by
reducing number of critical applications, by improving community productivity and so on. These factors can also be used to evaluate the success of gaming
communities and applied to measure the satisfaction
with new services.

TABLE I.
COMMUNITY IS SUCCESS FACTORS
Dimension Factor ID Factor
Use (JE) U.1 Number of Users
U.2 Number of Communities
U.3 Number of Method Invocation
U.4 Number of Information Units
Accessed
U.5 Type of Information Used
U.6 Duration of Use
U.7 Routinization of Use
U.8 Frequency of Use
U.9 Regularity of Use
U.10 Purpose of Use
User
Satisfaction
(ME) US.1 Overall satisfaction
US.2 Software satisfaction
US.3 Information Satisfaction
US.4 Perceived Enjoyment
US.5 Perceived Criticality
US.6 Perceived Privacy
Individual Impact (ME),
(SR) II.1 Learning
II.2 Information awareness
II.3 Information recall
II.4 Improved Individual Productivity
II.5 Individual Power or Influence
II.6 Personal Evaluation of IS
Community Impact (JE) CI.1 Community Evolution
CI.2 Number of Critical Applications
CI.3 Range and Scope of Application
CI.4 Improved Community Productivity
CI.5 Contribution to Community Goal
Achievement
CI.6 Encouragement of Collaboration
CI.7 Encouragement of Innovation

V. COMMUNITY MONITORING
One key concept with community IS system success
measurement is the inference from monitored user
behavior (U). The use of a lab prototype by community members needs to be monitored in order to estimate the
community satisfaction with the developed service.
The collected CSM data shou ld be processable with
statistical standard tool s, e.g. SPSS [20]. The
aforementioned MobSOS testbed provides built-in support for mobile context and service usage monitoring. Monitoring basically consists of logging
basic communication between client and server. Higher
level measures are derived from recorded monitoring data. For each particular measure we provide derivation
rules in form of SQL query statements, which could be
applied by a CSM request analysis and presentation
module to calculate a value for the measure in a later
stage.
The entity relationship diagram in Figure 6 depicts
all involved entities, their attributes and relationships among themselves. The basic unit is a request bound to
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a session. To support mobility evaluation, mobile
context information is taken into account for requests.

Figure 6. ER diagram for MobSOS monitoring data

Furthermore, subjective data on service success can
be recorded in online questionnaires generated by a
survey module provided by the MobSOS testbed [12].
We aimed to combine measures derived from
monitoring and questionnaire data in order to determine the quality of students’ prototypes in
supporting gaming communities.
In summary, monitoring of the service usage is
based on the MobSOS testbed and applied to the CSM. Additional information is extracted from the
automatically generated questionnaires. As a proof of concept, our lab performs case studies in two phases.
Lab participants use CSM to evaluate the community
satisfaction within already existing gaming communities to understand the community needs.
Furthermore, the success of their prototypes can also be
assessed by CSM.
Several examples of the extracted information by
means of applying CSM are presented below. An important finding for service developers for gaming
communities was as follows. If participants submit
high ratings on personal satisfaction with technical realization, presented information, multimedia content
and perceived enjoyment, they also rate for high
service success. Against all expectations, it is interesting that our analysis shows hardly any
correlation between service security and success.
TABLE II.
STATISTICS OF SERVICE CALLS
Services Mean time of a
service call (sec.) Sum of all
calls (min.) Number of
calls
Expert 31.24 342.8 544
Mailbox 1.89 13.2 285
Story 1.37 386.56 10128
User 10.79 39.15 1301
Total 4.71 781.71 12258

In order to give a proof-of-concept that new
multimedia community services, in particular gaming
community services, can be monitored easily with the
MobSOS testbed, we performed a preevaluation of a multimedia community service for digital multimedia
storytelling. Sample monitoring statistics of various
services around digital multimedia story production are
listed in Table II. In that sense, community-based
digital multimedia storytelling is also applicable in the domain of gaming communities. Gamers need to find
experts to share gaming e xperiences, to communicate
and to enjoy personalized game storylines. The
aforementioned evaluation sh ows, that in principal
CSM is also applicable to gaming community services. However, this statement must be confirmed by including a wider service portfolio into further
analysis.
VI.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we propose a community success
model (CSM) to measure community satisfaction. As
proof of concept, CSM has been well evaluated on a multimedia community service for storytelling.
Furthermore, CSM can be employed for the
measurement of gaming community satisfaction with regard to service support of gaming community
information systems. CSM evolved as a combination of
the well-developed D & M success model and the
augmentation by modern mobile multimedia
community aspects. The importance of gaming communities in our contemporary gaming world serves
as a motivation for our Gaming Community Lab at
which community oriented value-added services are developed. In the course, students aim to create an
innovative community supporting software. However,
the social needs of communities are very difficult to define in advance. In order to estimate those we
proposed the application of CSM.
We have made a step to measure the success of a
given community service as a combination of different technical and human factors, which is still an open
question addressed in this research area. Considering the variety and complexity of communities, CSM
needs to be evaluated not only on gaming communities
but also on different other communities. Further community satisfaction measures need to be considered
for the CSM in order to improve CSM model quality in
future. More monitoring data is currently gathered, and
more concrete and precise evaluation questionnaires
are to be generated.
At the same time, it will also be challenging to make
an in-depth comparison of the community satisfaction using the two distinctive as well as compulsory approaches: community monitoring community (the
monitoring service) and community observing
community (the questionnaires tool).
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was funded by the Excellence Initiative of
German National Science Foundation (DFG) within the
research cluster “Ultra High-Speed Mobile Information and
Communication” (UMIC) and the DFG project CONTICI.
Special thanks are due to all the students of the lab course
Gaming Communities in Summer Term 2008.
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Yiwei Cao is a doctoral researcher at the Information
Systems group at RWTH Aachen University. She receives a
diploma in computer science from RWTH Aachen University
and a bachelor in architecture from Shanghai Tongji
University. Her research interests are multimedia community
information systems, metadata standards for multimedia,
spatial data and cultural info rmation, and mobile social
software.
Anna Glukhova is a researcher at the Information
Systems group at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. She holds a diploma in computer science from RWTH Aachen
University. Her research interests include Requirements Engineering, Analysis of Di gital Social Networks, and
Design of innovative Social Software.
Ralf Klamma is a senior researcher at the Information
Systems group at RWTH Aachen University. He has visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge and
has been a substitute professor at the universities of Chemnitz
and Passau. His research interests include theory and
utilization of information systems, organizational memories
and workflow management, virtual community support,
social software, electronic learning and professional training.
Dominik Renzel is a Diploma student and a student
researcher at the Information Systems group at RWTH Aachen University. He has been involved in developing
several multimedia community information systems within
many research projects.

JOURNAL OF MULTIMEDIA, VOL. 4, NO. 2, APRIL 2009 93
© 2009 ACADEMY PUBLISHER