ABSTRACT While prior research on social video game play has emphasised the potential value of objective behavioural indicators, few studies have actually incorporated them. This study addresses this gap by combining survey data with large‐scale behavioural metrics. We surveyed 263 frequent Guild Wars 2 players and conceptually replicated a model linking passion, social capital, loneliness, and well‐being. The primary objective was to test the strength of the association between passion and social capital, which proved to be robust despite a partial replication of the broader model. A subsample of 148 participants matched with objective indicators of social play extracted from millions of game logs via the Guild Wars 2: Wingman analytics platform. These behavioural metrics explained substantial variance in both bonding and bridging social capital and demonstrated incremental validity beyond self‐report measures and the aforementioned passion. Our findings highlight the central role of passion in social gaming experiences and demonstrate the added value of integrating behavioural data. Including such indicators can enhance psychological models of gaming and might contribute to a more nuanced understanding.
Winklbauer et al. (Sun,) studied this question.