Scroll through any online forum dedicated to a beloved video game series and you will find something that looks strange from a marketing point of view. Fans pick apart the flaws of the games they love, argue over which installment ruined the franchise, and defend those same games ferociously the moment an outsider criticizes them. Is that advocacy or just complaining? A new study suggests it is both, and that the messy mix might be the truest sign of a devoted fan.
Writing in the Journal of Product & Brand Management, a team of researchers set out to map how fans actually promote and protect the game brands they care about. Rather than asking players to fill out surveys, they went straight to the source: tens of thousands of real conversations happening in gaming communities.
The question behind the research
Marketers have long studied “brand advocacy,” the ways customers actively support and recommend the products they love. Much of that research relies on a widely used model that boils advocacy down to four behaviors: saying positive things, defending the brand, sharing information, and using visual signals like emojis. That model was built and tested mostly on everyday products like retail banking and consumer electronics.
Naser Pourazad and Ehsan Abedin of Flinders University in Australia, along with Jacqueline Burgess of the University of the Sunshine Coast, suspected this streamlined model might miss something when applied to video games. Games are unusual as products because, as the authors put it, the boundary between the product and the brand is nearly indistinguishable. You do not just buy a game and walk away. You live inside it for hundreds of hours, and your feelings about it become tangled up with your sense of who you are.
The team leaned on a framework from psychology called social identity theory, which holds that people define part of themselves through the groups they belong to. Applied here, the idea is that a gamer defending a franchise online may be defending something closer to a piece of their own identity than a simple consumer preference.
Reading 23,000 conversations with the help of AI
The researchers collected public comments from the Reddit communities for two long-running first-person shooter franchises, Call of Duty and Battlefield. These series were picked on purpose. Both have existed for more than two decades and attract passionate fans, but they tend to attract different kinds of enthusiasm, which made them useful for comparison.
Over one year, from June 2023 to June 2024, the team gathered comments that contained any of 22 advocacy-related phrases, such as “best game,” “masterpiece,” “worth every penny,” and “can’t stop playing.” That yielded 6,952 comments from the Call of Duty community and 16,435 from the Battlefield community, for a total of more than 23,000.
To sort through all that text, the researchers trained a large language model, the type of artificial intelligence behind tools like ChatGPT, to recognize different flavors of advocacy. They hand-coded a set of example comments to teach the system what each type looked like, then tested it against comments labeled by human readers. The AI agreed with the human coders about 87 percent of the time. They also used a technique that reveals which specific words drive the AI’s decisions, so they could see, for example, that “love” signals positivity while “bullet drop” signals technical discussion.
Six ways fans show their love
The analysis found that all six of the advocacy behaviors from the older, fuller version of the model showed up naturally in gamer discourse, including the two that had been trimmed away in earlier survey research. The six dimensions were:
Brand Positivity (saying good things about the game), Brand Defence (standing up for it against critics), Virtual Positive Expression (emojis, symbols, and visual enthusiasm), Brand Zest (high-energy excitement), Brand Knowledge (sharing technical tips and details), and Brand Appraisal (honest, balanced comparisons that acknowledge flaws).
The single most common behavior was not gushing praise. It was defense. Brand Defence appeared in 45 percent of Call of Duty comments and 52 percent of Battlefield comments, outpacing simple positivity. The authors interpret this as a sign that in passionate communities, advocacy is activated by a protective instinct more than a promotional one.
Perhaps the finding that most complicates the traditional picture involves criticism. Brand Defence and Brand Appraisal frequently appeared together. In other words, the same fans who defended their games also picked apart their shortcomings. The researchers argue that in expert communities, honest critique does not weaken advocacy. It lends it credibility. A fan who can name a game’s flaws and still champion it comes across as more believable than one who only cheers.
Two roads to the same devotion
When the team compared the two communities, a clear split emerged in what fans talked about. Call of Duty discussions clustered around story, campaigns, characters, and modes like zombies. The language pointed toward narrative and shared experience. Battlefield discussions clustered around mechanics: vehicles, weapons, destruction, “combined arms,” and realistic warfare. The language pointed toward technical mastery.
Despite these different focuses, both communities produced advocacy of comparable intensity. The researchers describe this as two parallel pathways. One runs through emotion and storytelling, the other through expertise and system knowledge, yet both arrive at the same destination of fierce brand loyalty. They interpret this as evidence that identity-driven advocacy can be built on intellectual engagement just as much as on emotional attachment.
One more pattern stood out. Across both communities, the language of selling was almost entirely absent. Fans were not trying to convert new customers or push purchases. The most predictive phrases were things like “absolutely love,” “great memory,” and “feel like.” The authors read this as a sign that this advocacy is genuine and identity-driven, closer to a way of expressing membership in a group than a sales pitch.
What it might mean for brands
For companies that manage passionate communities, the study offers a few practical suggestions. The researchers argue that authentic advocacy grows out of real experiences, not promotional campaigns, so managers may do better to facilitate genuine conversation than to amplify marketing messages. They also suggest that criticism within a community should not automatically be read as a threat. If defense and appraisal reinforce each other, then suppressing complaints could weaken the very loyalty a brand wants to encourage.
The team also recommends that brands identify whether their community leans toward narrative or technical engagement, then tailor their approach accordingly, since both routes can produce equally devoted fans.
The authors are candid about the study’s limits. It looked at only two games, both in the same shooter genre, and drew entirely from Reddit, which has its own culture and norms that differ from platforms like Discord or Steam. The one-year window also cannot show how advocacy shifts over longer stretches or in response to major industry events. And because the study analyzed text rather than surveying people directly, it observes what fans wrote without directly measuring their internal sense of identity. The researchers suggest that future work combine this kind of large-scale text analysis with interviews or surveys to connect the words on screen to what is happening in players’ minds.
