For the win! Information needs in discourse of board gamers’ online communities

Abstract

As an essential part of the human experience with numerous social benefits, serious leisure is the phenomenon that has received attention in information behaviour research. Our study aims to contribute to this field by exploring board gamers’ communities’ information practices on social media sites. In our research, we adopted collectivist approaches, and the empirical part of the study was conducted as a quantitative content analysis. We examined the three most active board game Facebook groups, one for each language: English, French and Polish. The final dataset included N=764 posts. Each post from the sample was described with 47 variables, 23 of which were based upon the codebook of question topics. The information needs expressed in the form of the online questions were in overwhelming part related to the purchase intentions, less frequently concerned tactic knowledge. The distribution of replies between topics and groups in a different language showed visible differences between each group. Although this type of hobby includes both collectors’ and practitioners’ practices, the information presented in online discourse is dominated by those specific to collectors. Both information-seeking and sharing activities proved that board gamers’ online communities form a very information-rich social world.