Gaming on Social Media

Abstract The utilization of social media platforms, such as X and YouTube, has drastically reshaped the gaming community. This study aims to (a) identify the content themes, (b) determine the key influencers or bridging nodes who connect diverse subcommunities, and (c) investigate how user-generated narratives and player immersion contribute to community engagement. Guided by structural hole theory, the article analyzes the features of Minecraft’s dynamic interactions on X and YouTube by using social networks. The hashtag “Minecraft” was used to collect the related posts, while NodeXL Pro software was relied on to capture the posts and videos regarding Minecraft. This study reveals several tightly knit clusters focused on comedic shorts, lore-driven animations, building tutorials, and speedrunning challenges. Influencers with high betweenness centrality serve as “bridges” between these subgroups, enabling content sharing and thereby promoting the general community connectedness. These noted trends highlight how and why the Minecraft community keeps growing across platforms as they show its ability to generate and distribute innovative, problem-solving, and culturally relevant material at scale. The sandbox nature of Minecraft allows for a substantial amount of freedom and can be regarded as the major reason for it. Still, content creators, developers, and community leaders should play a more active role in their interaction with the community and can foster the continuous growth of the Minecraft community. Moreover, in the future, researchers may conduct large-scale research on the related X and YouTube data to enhance their understanding of social media dynamics.