Assessing Team Effectiveness by How Players Structure Their Search in a First‐Person Multiplayer Video Game

Abstract

People working as a team can achieve more than when working alone due to a team's ability to parallelize the completion of tasks. In collaborative search tasks, this necessitates the formation of effective division of labor strategies to minimize redundancies in search. For such strategies to be developed, team members need to perceive the task's relevant components and how they evolve over time, as well as an understanding of what others will do so that they can structure their own behavior to contribute to the team's goal. This study explored whether the capacity for team members to coordinate effectively can be related to how participants structure their search behaviors in an online multiplayer collaborative search task. Our results demonstrated that the structure of search behavior, quantified using detrended fluctuation analysis, was sensitive to contextual factors that limit a participant's ability to gather information. Further, increases in the persistence of movement fluctuations during search behavior were found as teams developed more effective coordinative strategies and were associated with better task performance.

Conversation dynamics in a multiplayer video game with knowledge asymmetry

“…In contrast, when no fog was present, ground players had a greater ability to perform tasks independently without the guidance of the operator, which then enabled a team’s search to be more like a parallel process. In recent work ( Nalepka et al, 2022 ), the challenges imposed by fog could be mitigated by giving direct access of the in-game map to the ground players – in this case, through a head-up display ( HUD ). This work demonstrated that when ground players are given a HUD, there was no impact of task visibility on team performance.…”

“…Teams played a networked multiplayer game referred to as Desert Herding ( Nalepka et al, 2022 ). The task was inspired by previous research exploring corralling behaviors in two-person task contexts ( Nalepka et al, 2017 , 2019 , 2021b ; Rigoli et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The cyan circle represents the location of the containment area. Adapted from Nalepka et al (2022) .…”

“…In the task employed here, teams of three individuals had to coordinate to search for and corral evasive agents which were scattered across a large virtual environment. Participants had a “first-person” perspective of the game and utilized keyboard and mouse controls common in the FPS genre ( Nalepka et al, 2022 ). Inspired by the role of the “spectator” in multiplayer FPS games, a fourth player was introduced who served as a spectator or drone operator in the task.…”

“…In order to achieve this aim, we first must understand the contextual factors, behavioural strategies and communication dynamics which impact team performance and explains expertise. This experiment is one of the first of many which seeks to answer this question ( Nalepka et al, 2022 ).…”