CONTEXTO Y DIAGNÓSTICO

Trust

Figure 5.14: Winning and losing trust scores across games

Data T-Test Trust

P-Value Cohen’s D

All < 0.001 0.750

Dota 2 < 0.001 1.552 War Thunder < 0.001 0.790

Arma 0.061 0.649

Natural Selection 2 0.040 0.519

CS:GO 0.327 0.483

Mount & Blade 0.009 0.454

29th I.D. 0.399 0.450

Chivalry 0.251 0.325

Table 5.25: Significance and effect size in trust between winning and losing.

Performance & Competitive Social Presence

The differences in competitive social presence also appear to vary from game to game. However, the variation is far less than cooperative social presence, with only CS:GO standing out as a game in which competitive social presence is affected by winning or losing.

Data T-Test Competitive P-Value Cohen’s D

All 0.014 0.219

CS:GO 0.050 1.282

Arma 0.543 0.284

Natural Selection 2 0.386 0.258

Chivalry 0.482 0.244

Mount & Blade 0.249 0.185

Dota 2 0.473 0.159

War Thunder 0.730 0.058

29th I.D. 0.901 0.037

Table 5.26: Effect size in competitive social presence between winning and losing.

Arma Win Arma Loss 29th ID Win 29th ID Loss CS:GO Win CS:GO Loss NS2 Win NS2 Loss Dota 2 Win Dota 2 Loss M&B Win M&B Loss Chivalry Win Chivalry Loss WT Win WT Loss

1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0 3.5 4.0 4.5 5.0

Competitive social presence across games: Win/Loss

Competitive Social Presence

Figure 5.15: WinningCompetitive Social Presence,LosingCompetitive Social Presence

Figure 5.16 gives a more fine grained view of the interplay between the competitive modules and perfor-mance. The Figure suggests that while Module 1.2 (competitive engagement) remains largely static over the win/loss conditions, Module 1.1 (competitive awareness) appears to be more greatly affected. Table 5.27 confirms this, showing that with the exception of CS:GO, only Module 1.1 has substantial effect sizes across the games.

Arma 1.1 Win Arma 1.1 Loss Arma 1.2 Win Arma 1.2 Loss Chiv 1.1 Win Chi 1.1 Loss Chiv 1.2 Win Chiv 1.2 Loss

CSGO 1.1 Win CSGO 1.1 Loss CSGO 1.2 Win CSGO 1.2 Loss Dota 1.1 Win Dota 1.1 Loss Dota 1.2 Win Dota 1.2 Loss M&B 1.1 Win M&B 1.1 Loss M&B 1.2 Win M&B 1.2 Loss NS 1.1 Win NS 1.1 Loss NS 1.2 Win NS 1.2 Loss 29th 1.1 Win 29th 1.1 Loss 29th 1.2 Win 29th 1.2 Loss WT 1.1 Win WT 1.1 Loss WT 1.2 Win WT 1.2 Loss

1 2 3 4 5

Competitive module scores across games: Win/Loss

Average Score

Figure 5.16: WinningModule 1.1,LosingModule 1.1,WinningModule 1.2,LosingModule 1.2

Module 1.2 measures the sense of competitive engagement a player has with their opponents, it contains items such as ‘My opponents were challenging’, ‘I felt tense while playing my opponents’, ‘The presence of my opponents motivated me’, ‘My opponents played a significant role in my experience of the game’

and so on. The fact that no game except CS:GO showed any change in Module 1.2 based on performance suggests that winning or losing did not alter respondent’s perception of the challenge presented by their opponents, nor how much affect their opponents had on their experience of the game. It might be expected that respondents would have felt that their opponents had more of an effect on their experience having lost, however it seems that respondents were equally engaged with their opponents no matter what the outcome. This may be due to team-based digital games being a form of ‘co-created media’[Morris, 2003], their experience relying as much on the other players as the game itself. In these games it might be that because one’s opponents form a consistent proportion of the game experience, winning or losing is irrelevant. The consistency of Module 1.2 might also be due to other issues, in team-based digital games one can face a challenging opponent and still win, and due to the variety of personal motivation winning or losing may have little to do with how much an enemy has motivated a player, and so on.

T-Test T-Test Cohen’s D Cohen’s D Module 1.1 Module 1.2 Module 1.1 Module 1.2

All <0.001 0.422 0.372 0.068

Table 5.27: Significance and effect size in competitive modules between winning and losing. T-Test P &

Cohen’s D values

With the exception of Arma and War Thunder, performance affected Module 1.1. Module 1.1 measures how aware players were of the interplay between them and their opponents, it asks players about their Theory of Mind, about the extent to which they reacted to their opponents and considered their opponent’s thoughts.

The fact that the average losing score for this module was lower for almost all the games in this study suggests that losing leads to a reduced awareness and consideration of one’s opponents, perhaps the feeling that one was unable to accurately simulate the minds of one’s opponents, or possibly the feeling that one has had little noticeable effect on the opposing team.

This may be due to a sense of helplessness or loss of control from being part of an unavoidable defeat, for example if a player is part of a team being outclassed, then they may not have the time to evaluate the opponents. It may be that players on a losing team are more concerned with their team than their enemies, or perhaps being on a losing team equated to less time spent actively playing the game. Being on the losing team in team-based digital games often leads to dying more frequently, and in these games dying usually means less time playing and more time waiting to respawn, this reduced time in game may have caused respondents to consider their enemies less.

War Thunder stands out in Table 5.27 as being almost unaffected by performance in terms of competitive social presence, Arma also shows a very limited effect. This suggests that in these games the level of awareness players have for their opponents, and the extent to which they are engaged with them, is not affected by performance. What these games have in common is expansive virtual environments in which gameplay occurs, for example the default map of Arma 2 is over 200 square kilometres and War Thunder has maps ranging from 60km x 65km to 200km x 200km in size. As this is one of the only common features of both games it may be that these large environments change the way players perceive their opponents, creating a conceptual as well as (virtual) physical distance.

CS:GO stands out in particular as being having the most striking difference between winning and losing in terms of competitive social presence. It is the only game to have a noticeable affect in Module 1.2, and has the largest effect size by a large margin of Module 1.1. The effect on Module 1.2 suggests that in CS:GO the losing respondents were less mindfully engaged by their opponents, they considered them to have less

of an effect on their experience of the game, and perhaps that the game was less about their opponents being more tactical or strategic than them, but simply being better at the core mechanics of the game.

Familiarity

While it may seem that the cooperative social presence and team trust scales had measured the same concept in this study, the variety of familiarity correlations across games show that the two were perhaps not measuring identical concepts (Table 5.28). The team trust literature stated that high familiarity has a positive relationship with trust, and as with the overall dataset, the data from each game concurred with this assertion. While there is variation from game to game, familiarity correlates with team trust in each game, suggesting that team trust is consistently higher if respondents know their team-mates.

Data Familiarity Familiarity Familiarity Familiarity

& Trust & Cooperative SP & Module 2.1 & Module 2.2

All 0.44 0.40 0.41 0.31

29th ID 0.59 0.51 0.61 0.24

Arma 0.58 0.47 0.53 0.33

Chivalry 0.37 0.26 0.29 0.16

CS:GO 0.31 0.34 0.32 0.34

Dota 2 0.32 0.24 0.22 0.18

Mount & Blade 0.35 0.40 0.43 0.27

Natural Selection 2 0.40 0.28 0.27 0.19

War Thunder 0.41 0.31 0.30 0.30

Table 5.28: Correlation between Mean Familiarity and Trust/Cooperative Social Presence (Cooperative SP)

The two groups of respondents which display strong correlations between trust and familiarity are Arma and 29th I.D. clan. These two groups of respondents reported the highest proportion of organized play, both over 50%, which is likely to be a factor in the these results. Arma and 29th I.D. clan also have fairly high correlations between overall cooperative social presence but have interesting differences between the cooperative modules.

While Arma shows correlations between both Module 2.1 & 2.2 and familiarity, 29th I.D. data only shows a correlation on Module 2.1. This suggests that while in Arma there is an interplay between familiarity and both perceived team cohesion and player involvement, in 29th I.D. familiarity only affects perceived team cohesion. This difference in player experience may be due to the different communities, or the differences in gameplay. While both data sets have a similar percentage of organized play (60-70%), similar average familiarity levels (Figure 5.4.6), and both are based on games which focus on realism, their are many differences between the two in terms of theme, virtual environments, functionality, and so on.

Chivalry, Dota 2 and Natural Selection 2 show no strong correlation between cooperative social presence and mean familiarity, suggesting that in team-based games, though being familiar with one’s team-mates always increases trust to some degree, it does not necessarily affect social presence. However it is hard to discern a common factor between these three games which might lead to these shared results. While all

show fairly low average familiarity scores (Figure 5.4.6), other games with low familiarity scores such as Mount & Blade and War Thunder do not share this lack of correlation. It might be that the communities of these games share common traits or that the players of these games share similar expectations of the game experience.

Arma 29th ID CSGO NS2 Dota MnB Chivalry WT

1 2 3 4 5