How Thinking Styles Impact Team Success

Hello friends.

Welcome to episode #78 of your weekly update on the latest in gaming and esports science. Today, we discuss how a player's thinking style can impact team performance and enjoyment, and how you can use this understanding to become a better player.

😃 Seeking Enjoyment and Performance

Some of the most successful video games, particularly esports titles, are team games. At the same time, players have different strengths and weaknesses. When we queue up in our favorite team game, we might not always get the teammates we want. For instance, players who excel at solo fighting may be terrible at cooperating, which could cause the overall team strength to diminish and enjoyment to plummet as the game progresses due to teammates' complaints or toxic behavior.

Typically, having some level of diversity on your team increases your chances of winning. For instance, queuing up with four others who prefer to play support (low role diversity) may not be a great idea. Similarly, it is assumed that a mix of thinking styles among team members could benefit team performance and the enjoyment of your team mates' and yours'.

The study we'll look at today uses two categories of thinking-style dimensions:

• Local-global: players prefer to handle problems in a detailed and immediate (local) or comprehensive (global) manner.
• Liberal-conservative: players with stronger liberal tendencies are willing to take higher risks for potentially bigger rewards and enjoy unpredictability. In contrast, those with conservative tendencies prefer predictability and steady progress.

The figure below shows the mapping between thinking styles and in-game actions or player behavior.

💽 LoLDB

The authors scraped data for 64,043 matches played by 185,158 players from LoLDB. After filtering for matches over 25 minutes, they ended up with a sample of about 25,000 matches. Players were categorized according to their thinking styles (determined based on their abilities). Finally, they surveyed 26 players, recruited from a LoL forum, and interviewed 14 gamers with experience from across multiple games (StarCraft 2, League of Legends, and Hearthstone).

🎲 G-L and L-C - What is the Best Combination?

"Our most important finding is that the presence of global-liberal (G-L) style players is positively correlated with match enjoyment [1]."

Having at least one global-liberal player on your team may decrease the chance of others' willingness to surrender the game because they enjoy playing the game. The authors argue that this might be due to G-L players taking themselves back to support others (assist them) and hence promote the idea of a winning chance.

Conversely, 20% of all matches were short when both teams had one or more global-conservative player. As a consequence, players had diminished match enjoyment levels.

"... our results indicate that teams with G-L players and without L-C players were stronger [1]."

This finding may not be surprising. The authors argue that G-L players have strong observation skills, support their team members, enjoy taking risks, and have an engaging style of play, which are all useful attributes in games such as LoL.

Last but not least, teams who had one or more local and conservative (L-C) style players had a lower win rate. It was stated that players of this type focus on farming minions to get stronger (buy items and level up), but this doesn't mean much when they aren't good at other things and can't carry the game.

🤔 What can We Learn from It?

There are really two main aspects I would like to bring to your attention with regards to understanding how these results can help you.

1. Understanding what thinking style others have is a valuable tool in understanding (and anticipating) behavior. If you know what your team mates and enemies may do gives you the chance to always be one step ahead of the game. Let me give you an example, if your top laner sticks to farming and pushing his lane to destroy towers, he's likely not going to force fights. Hence, you may want to play more conservative as well and wait for him to finally make a move instead of forcing a fight.
2. It also helps you to understand yourself better. Now that you know how in-game behavior aligns with thinking styles, you can adapt your own behavior too. This allows you to work on your weaknesses and lean into your strengths.

A last valuable point I'd like to touch on is what game developers could do to improve their game. As the authors stated: "game designers may want to identify ways to evenly distribute G-L style players between or among competing teams in an effort to increase motivation to continue play."

Thanks for reading. Till next week,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Wang et al., 2024