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Functional or Social?: Exploring Teams in Online Games by Yun Huang; Wenyue Ye; Nicholas Bennett; Noshir Contractor is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Functional or Social?: Exploring Teams in Online Games about?

Team collaboration in multi-player online games provides opportunities for players to interact with each other. Facilitating teams has become one of the main design principles to increase social activities. However, there is no research evidence that collaborating on tasks in game teams can produce the desired relational outcome. This paper examines more than half a million solo and team activities during a week in Dragon Nest, an MMO game. We measure the degree of team engagement using the percentage of time played in teams and the percentage of play with repeated teammates, and we then identify different types of players using this. The results show that solo players and team players are two distinct populations and they are highly predictable based on players' in-game status. Moreover, we find that spending more time in teams does not always lead to more social interactions. The interviews with players are conducted to validate the findings.

Author

Yun Huang; Wenyue Ye; Nicholas Bennett; Noshir Contractor

Publisher

ACM

Published

2013

Language

EN