Data Mining User Generated Content: Transforming Play and Leisure in Online Social Gaming into Business Analytics

In this paper, we investigate the gathering and utilization of user-generated data from online video games, and the process of innovating data mining technologies to digitally sort individuals and groups within the social games industry. How and why do information and data entrepreneurs in the online games industry instrumentalize user behaviour in online games for the purpose of data mining? Primary data gathered for this investigation includes in-depth interviews with multinational industry stakeholders about their business practices, revenue sourcing, and emergent data mining algorithms in order to explore the politics that lie behind data and its acquisition, management, sale, and distribution.