Augury by Allocation: Actuating Homebrew Tasseomancy to Better Understand Influencer Efficacy on Boycott Outcome

Abstract

By gathering and analysing data from various social media sites, this study examines a boycott event, and the potential ramifications it might have had on the pen-and-paper roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons. The game is an intellectual property which belongs to Wizards of the Coast, which is itself a subsidiary of the much larger toy company Hasbro. The granularity of the specific game’s IP, relative to the scope of Hasbro’s enterprise, renders conventional data such as stock prices ineffective for demonstrating the effect of a boycott. Therefore, data was instead collected from social media sites YouTube, and Reddit, and analysed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, in order to create a snapshot of the conversational space on the sites. The YouTube data sample contains 6 months’ worth of videos content (n=1064 videos, ≈257 hours) by 21 influencers who cover various pen-and-paper roleplaying games, though predominantly Dungeons & Dragons. The Reddit data sample contains 41.455 posts made on the Reddit subforum /r/Pathfinder2e, between March 28th 2018 and April 30th 2023. Following a controversial event which occurred in early January 2023, this study shows that a number of significant changes happened within the two communities. These effects are also in line with literature on Psychological Ownership, and on building communitarian solidarity in Disclosing New Worlds’. First, the focus of the video content being published on YouTube changed significantly. Second, /r/Pathfinder2e experienced an unprecedented level of user activity, primarily as a result of players abandoning Dungeons & Dragons in favour of playing Pathfinder instead. Third, a connection is drawn between the YouTube video content being published about the event, and activity on /r/Pathfinder2e. The study concludes with a discussion of why the resulting changes are important for Wizards of the Coast, and how the techniques used in for analysis may be used to understand the effect of boycotts, and what the requirements are.