Potential of inducing serendipitous news discovery in social gaming environment

Abstract

This poster presents the preliminary findings from the study, which aimed to explore the potential of inducing serendipitous news discovery in social gaming environment. Erdelez' (2004) model of Information Encountering was used as a theoretical foundation to create a social game site, which was intended to provide a relaxed natural foreground activity for players without their awareness about serendipitous opportunity. A total of 269 players signed up to the site. Only half of those who signed up actually played and about 4% of those did what the game required to an extent that would allow them a chance to win prizes. Despite a low number of active players, there were 76 incidents of news clicks, which indicates serendipitous news discovery. About 29 participants clicked on news stories during their stay in the game site. The findings of this study indicate that social gaming environment is worth to explore further as a potential platform to facilitate serendipitous news discovery. The social game template created for this research could be used for various user-engagement games to continue testing the idea of inducing serendipitous information discovery in natural context. A novel approach of measuring serendipitous news exposure using log data and data mining algorithm was developed as a result of this study.