Game of Thrones — Beyond the Power Struggles
A deeper analysis of the series’ social network
With Game of Thrones’ Season 4 premiere almost here, nothing better than remembering what the series were like in Season 1.
I don’t know how it was like for you, but when I watched the first season of Game of Thrones for the first time, it was somewhat complicated to keep track of the plot and all of the characters’ names, houses, and allegiances, without any aid. The second and third seasons added even more characters and side-plots, which made it even harder to keep track of everything if you didn’t have a good understanding of the first one.
Reading A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin made some things clearer, but also introduced a few extra characters and a little bit more of history and background. Besides that, the scenes in the series don’t have the same “weight” as the respective chapters in the book, which might give you a different perspective on the plot.
Looking back to the first season, I now understand that it was all about Ned Stark. However, there seemed to be other dynamics that weren't visible to the naked eye. In this way, I set out to watch it from a fresh perspective and employ a method called Social Network Analysis (SNA) in order to gain new insights on the characters’ relationships and dynamics.
The Method
When analyzing a social network, you first have to define your focus. You can have a friendship network (who are each person’s friends), an advice network (who does each person seek for advice), or a communication network (with whom does each person communicate each day), for example. In order to study these networks, you have to build questionnaires and ask each person of the network to fill them.
After debating for a while, we got to a consensus on what we were going to analyze — interactions. Since this is a TV show and we can’t really ask characters anything, we defined interactions as every verbal, physical or gestural action between them.
I got together with two of my colleagues for watching the first season and start collecting data — with each episode lasting sixty minutes on average, this was no easy task for a single person. One of my colleagues had never watched Game of Thrones, and the other one had only watched the first season and a few episodes of the second one. This was crucial in not biasing our analysis of the series, since I had already watched all of the three seasons.
While watching each episode, we noted down the interactions between the 120 characters and how many times they occurred. After all the magic (i.e., Excel and Gephi analysis) was done, we got to some pretty interesting conclusions.
The Socialites
Like in real life, if you know and talk to a lot of people, you have a bigger relevance in a network. The degree measure in SNA translates how many interactions each character had with other characters, which can also translate the importance of the character in the network. In this way, the most prominent characters are also the ones who have more “air time”.
Confirming our guess at the beginning, the first season of Game of Thrones is all about Eddard Stark. However, it is interesting to see other characters arise that didn't seem that relevant for a first time watcher, like Arya Stark. It’s also interesting to see that, like in our perception of the series, The King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, isn't that relevant for the plot.
Spoiler alert: If you've watched or read the rest of the story, you know that these characters are actually the ones who’ll be most relevant in the future.
Social Network Analysis in Real Life
This is a simple demonstration of how SNA can be used in order to study any kind of networks you can think of: that of your favorite series, of your friends (e.g., Facebook), co-workers, or even food.
While this knowledge can be easily available to you, the real issue is how to use it in order to make better decisions on what and who to keep close to you.
