Computer Science – Social and Information Networks
Scientific paper
2012-03-10
Computer Science
Social and Information Networks
9 pages, 12 figures, 4 tables
Scientific paper
How important are friendships in determining success by individuals and teams in complex competitive environments? By combining a novel data set on the dynamics of millions of ad hoc team-based competitions from the massively multiplayer online first person shooter (MMOFPS) Halo: Reach with ground-truth data on player demographics, play style, psychometrics and friendships derived from an anonymous online survey, we investigate the impact of friendship on performance in such competitive environments. We find that friendships play a fundamental role, leading to both improved individual and team performance---even after controlling for the overall expertise of the team---and increased pro-social behavior. Furthermore, because players structure their in-game activities around opportunities to play with friends, we show that friendships can largely be inferred directly from behavioral time series using common-sense heuristics. Algorithms that leverage the utility of friendships, without needing explicitly labeled (and thus private) data, are thus both possible and will likely improve many aspects of competition prediction and design.
Clauset Aaron
Mason Winter
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