Measuring Cooperative Behavior in Contemporary Multiplayer Games

Social aspects of multiplayer games are well known as contributors to game success, with online friendships and socialization expected to expand and strengthen a player-base. Understanding the nature of social behavior and determining the impact of cooperation on gameplay is thus important to game design. In this work, we make use of data exposed through in-game and web-based API’s of two contemporary multiplayer games, World of Warcraft and Halo: Reach. We use this data to investigate the extent of cooperation among players and the effect on individual player behavior. We moreover show how the quantitative assessment of cooperative behavior can be used to isolate potential problem areas in games which may require additional balancing. We first monitor group health and position to measure the pacing of a cooperative scenario in World of Warcraft. We measure a scenario’s pacing as the temporal progression of its difficulty, which directly reflects the required level of cohesion and coordination among the players in a group. Our results verify the informal perception that statically designed content becomes increasingly trivial as players obtain stronger stats, thus reducing the need for cohesion. Direct quantification of this behavior, as enabled by designs such as ours, allows for online, adaptive pacing that should better foster player community by consistently emphasizing the need for communication. The benefits of actual group behavior also has a reverse impact on game design. In our experiment involving Halo: Reach, our results demonstrate that