November 22, 2003
Sharing Contact Info
Sharing real life contact info is one way to measure how willing MMORPG players are in bringing their virtual social network into the real world. While it could be argued that people giving out their IM’s and emails are maintaining superficial guild contact information for distribution, that is a less viable argument for why people give out their phone numbers. I feel that measuring the prevalence of sharing contact information gives a rough approximation of the strength of social ties that develop in the game. Any thoughts?
Below are gender differences in the sharing of contact information, separating the people who have given their contact info to only one person from the people who have shared that information with more than one person.
And here are the age differences. The doubling of people who give out their phone numbers over the age range is quite striking.
