Beyond Competitive Gaming: How Casual Players Evaluate and Respond to Teammate Performance

TL;DR

This study investigates how casual players evaluate and respond to teammate performance in cooperative games, revealing differences from competitive contexts and emphasizing the importance of relative comparison in performance assessment.

Contribution

It demonstrates that casual players rely on relative performance evaluation and exhibit frustration behaviors not captured by self-reports, challenging existing competitive gaming frameworks.

Findings

Players evaluate teammates through relative comparison.

Frustration behaviors are observed but not reported.

Self-reports and observations assess different constructs.

Abstract

Teammate performance evaluation fundamentally shapes intervention design in video games. However, our current understanding stems primarily from competitive E-Sports contexts where individual performance directly impacts outcomes. This research addresses whether performance evaluation mechanisms and behavioural responses identified in competitive games generalize to casual cooperative games. We investigated how casual players evaluate teammate competence and respond behaviourally in a controlled between-subjects experiment (N=23). We manipulated confederate performance in Overcooked 2, combining observations, NASA TLX self-reports, and interviews. We present two key findings. (1) Observations revealed frustration behaviours completely absent in self-report data. Thus, these instruments assess fundamentally distinct constructs. (2) Participants consistently evaluated teammate performance through relative comparison rather than absolute metrics. This contradicts task-performance operationalizations dominant in competitive gaming research. Hence, performance evaluation frameworks from competitive contexts cannot be directly applied to casual cooperative games. We provide empirical evidence that performance evaluation in casual games requires a comparative operationalization.