Reigniting the flame: Sustaining Usage Through Intermittent Releases of In-game Content

Downloadable contents (DLCs) are additional in-game contents that developers release periodically to sustain the interest of users. In this paper, we study the effect of these DLC releases on the usage of a game by analysing actual usage data from 241 DLCs released over a period of 12 years. We use a quasi-experimental analysis to determine the effect on usage, and also investigate the effect of different DLCs categories on usage. We also study the effect of the different categories of game developers, indie and AAA, on the relationship between DLC release and usage. Results indicate that different categories of DLCs have distinct effects on usage. We also find that the release of DLCs of indie games have a greater impact on usage as compared to AAA games. We compare and contrast our results with the extant literature and provide insightful guidelines to game developers on managing DLC releases

“Maybe You Should Talk to Someone”: The Role of Online Communities on Mental Healthcare

Online Health Communities like YouTube offer mental health patients an alternative channel to learn about mental illnesses, the treatment path to follow, and to share their experiences. For many patients who are reluctant to seek professional help, a video on mental health uploaded by a content creator may serve as a substitute for a counsellor. Our work aims to develop an understanding of the relationship between language formality and social support and provide normative guidelines for content creators on social media platforms. Using two transformer-based deep learning classification models, we determine the degree of language formality or informality present in the content, and three dimensions of social support in the comments. We then utilize propensity score estimation to establish the causal effect of (in)formality on the dimensions of social support for 994 videos and 3,10,157 comments. Our findings indicate that informal speech increases emotional support, leading to better health outcomes

Information Gap in Physician Review Websites: A Comparative Study of Patient Expectations and Available Information

Physician Review Websites (PRWs) help users select physicians by providing both structured and unstructured data on physicians and patients’ experiences with the physicians. In this paper, we study PRWs as an information system and investigate the adequacy of the available information. We first conduct an empirical study to understand the information that patients seek from PRWs through a survey instrument administered on 243 patients. We then use a topic modeling approach on approximately 81,000 text reviews of patients (unstructured data) to discover the information that is actually available on the PRWs. We then combine the findings from both the approaches and find that 9 out of the top 15 areas patients consider important are unavailable or partially available on PRWs, thus highlighting an information gap. Our work will help PRWs and physicians/hospitals restructure information on their websites and devise strategies to nudge patients to write reviews highlighting the desired information