Change is Hard: Consistent Player Behavior Across Games with Conflicting Incentives

TL;DR

This study investigates player behavior consistency across two different competitive games, revealing that individual agency influences cross-platform behavior more than game incentives.

Contribution

Introduces a novel cross-game analysis method tracking the same players across two environments, highlighting the role of individual agency over game structure.

Findings

Players show consistent behavior across games despite different incentives.

Game incentives influence behavior, but individual tendencies remain stable.

Cross-game behavior analysis reduces self-selection bias.

Abstract

This paper examines how player flexibility -- a player's willingness to engage in a breadth of options or specialize -- manifests across two gaming environments: League of Legends (League) and Teamfight Tactics (TFT). We analyze the gameplay decisions of 4,830 players who have played at least 50 competitive games in both titles and explore cross-game dynamics of behavior retention and consistency. Our work introduces a novel cross-game analysis that tracks the same players' behavior across two different environments, reducing self-selection bias. Our findings reveal that while games incentivize different behaviors (specialization in League versus flexibility in TFT) for performance-based success, players exhibit consistent behavior across platforms. This study contributes to long-standing debate about agency versus structure, showing individual agency may be more predictive of cross-platform behavior than game-imposed structure in competitive settings. These insights offer implications for game developers, designers and researchers interested in building systems to promote behavior change.