Crossing Virtual Realms: Exploring the Social Interactions of Gaming Communities of Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Discord

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) is a social networking game that gained popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic for offering players a way to maintain social interactions and a routine in their daily lives. Players transform a deserted island into paradise by building a community filled with lively animal villagers. The game fosters exploring, decorating, and interacting with fellow players, which led to the formation of online communities surrounding ACNH, most notably on platforms such as Discord. Despite extensive research on social interactions in MMORPG’s and MMOPG’s, social networking games such as ACNH are less focused upon. This thesis aims to fill this gap by exploring the social interactions within the ACNH Discord community with the following research question: How is social interaction structured and centralized within a gaming Discord community, and what are the key characteristics of the identified sub-communities? Textual messages from the ACNH Discord’s general chat channel were collected using Discord’s API, from which only direct replies were selected for analysis to infer about the connections between community members. A mixed method approach was used to gain insights on both the underlying structure and the meanings of the community members’ social interactions. A network analysis is used to identify central figures in the community and their social roles, as well as the sub-communities within the network. The community was found to have a small-world network with loose divisions into sub-communities. The central figures took on the roles of socializer, content generator, passive member and bridging member. The thematic analysis examines the contents of the members’ messages to understand how social identity and social presence is experienced within the sub-communities. Social identity is mostly expressed through recognizing similarities in interests, preferences, and experiences in gaming. Social presence is encouraged by sharing about their real lives, such as relationships and their days’ activities, and by engaging in shared actions. The findings of this thesis may offer practical suggestions for video game franchises for promoting player engagement and theoretical implications for several academic fields. However, as many components of social identity and social presence were not commonly found, follow-up research may be useful. Qualitative interviews, for example, may provide a more thorough understanding of the community members’ social interactions from their perspective.