Wordfeud als sociaal platform

Nowadays we can communicate independent of time and place. Developments in computer en telecommunications result in more online contact with friends and family, even while playing an online game. Therefore, it seems less important to meet each other face to face. The question is what consequences this development might have for peoples social relationships. This research focuses on the way older and younger users of an online game, named Wordfeud, use this game as a social platform to maintain their social relationships. The research question is: ‘Which role plays the game Wordfeud as a social platform for the social relationships of users in the age of 50 tot 65 and users in the age of 16 to 25?’ This research focuses on users motives to play Wordfeud and use the chatfunction while playing the game. It also focuses on the role of time and place, the role of Wordfeud in the offline social network, the role of playing with known and unknown persons and the skills that are required to play Wordfeud. This research is qualitative and mainly exploring. The research exists of twenty interviews, ten in every age category. The research shows that Wordfeud does not play a very important role as a social platform for users in the age of 50 to 65 and users in the age of 16 to 25. The chatfunction is mainly used to support the game itself, instead of supporting the social aspect. The older users in this research find the social aspect more important than the younger users. A positive stimulus for the users of Wordfeud is that they can play the game at any time and place they prefer. The skills they need to play Wordfeud are not very important. That is because the respondents know the original game Scrabble well and use this knowledge to play Wordfeud. However, the older users have some problems with the operational skills of the game. This is not a problem, because friends and family help them. All users in this research play Wordfeud with people they know and with whom they already had face to face contact on a regular basis. Some younger users also play with unknown people en chat with them. They state that the relationship with the unknown people they play is not of the same qualitative level as the relationship they have with friends and family. None of the users in this research added new people to their offline social network. Therefore, we can say that Wordfeud plays no important role in the offline social network of users. Sometimes they do have more insight in other peoples daily lives, however the quality as well as the quantity of the social relations in both age catogories did not change.