An Empirical Study on Team Formation in Online Games

TL;DR

This study analyzes how factors like familiarity and competence influence team formation in online games, revealing familiarity's importance and nuanced effects of competence, based on extensive data from Battlefield 4.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the roles of familiarity and competence in team formation within online gaming environments.

Findings

Familiarity significantly influences team formation.

Homophily does not significantly affect team choices.

High competence leads to repeated teaming, while large competence disparities reduce repeated interactions.

Abstract

Online games provide a rich recording of interactions that can contribute to our understanding of human behavior. One potential lesson is to understand what motivates people to choose their teammates and how their choices leadto performance. We examine several hypotheses about team formation using a large, longitudinal dataset from a team-based online gaming environment. Specifically, we test how positive familiarity, homophily, and competence determine team formationin Battlefield 4, a popular team-based game in which players choose one of two competing teams to play on. Our dataset covers over two months of in-game interactions between over 380,000 players. We show that familiarity is an important factorin team formation, while homophily is not. Competence affects team formation in more nuanced ways: players with similarly high competence team-up repeatedly, but large variations in competence discourage repeated interactions.