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Playing with strangers: understanding temporary teams in league of legends

Published: 19 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Game researchers have extensively studied how players form long-term social organizations such as guilds and clans to accomplish complex tasks such as raiding in online games. Few studies have paid attention to how temporary teams (or pickup groups) composed of strangers fulfill complex tasks. Riot Games' League of Legends, a team-based competitive online game, is played by two temporary teams. Players must collaborate with strangers in a relatively short time (about 30-50 minutes). How do players interact and collaborate with their teammates in temporary teams? To answer this question, we conducted an ethnographic study within the League of Legends community. We conducted 30 semi-structured interviews with experienced players. We found that rich social interaction exists within temporary teams. Players want to collaborate with strangers through communication and coordination. They discipline their own ways of interaction to facilitate collaboration. They try to exert influence over their teammates. We further discuss design implications for facilitating collaboration among strangers.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI PLAY '14: Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play
    October 2014
    492 pages
    ISBN:9781450330145
    DOI:10.1145/2658537
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 19 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. collaboration
    2. deviant behavior
    3. league of legends
    4. multiplayer online games
    5. pickup group
    6. regulation
    7. social interaction
    8. temporary team

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