Effects of Social Behaviours in Online Video Games on Team Trust

In competitive multiplayer online video games, teamwork is of utmost importance, implying high levels of interdependence between the joint outcomes of players. When engaging in such interdependent interactions, humans rely on trust to facilitate coordination of their individual behaviours. However, online games often take place between teams of strangers, with individual members having little to no information about each other than what they observe throughout the interaction itself. A better understanding of the social behaviours that are used by players to form trust could not only facilitate richer gaming experiences, but could also lead to insights about team interactions. As such, this paper presents a first step towards understanding how and which types of in-game behaviour relate to trust formation. In particular, we investigate a) which in-game behaviour were relevant for trust formation (first part of the study) and b) how they relate to the reported player’s trust in their teammates (the second part of the study). The first part consisted of interviews with League of Legends players in order to create a taxonomy of in-game behaviours relevant for trust formation. As for the second part, we ran a small-scale pilot study where participants played the game and then answered a questionnaire to measure their trust in their teammates. Our preliminary results present a taxonomy of in-game behaviours which can be used to annotate the games regarding trust behaviours. Based on the pilot study, the list of behaviours could be extended as to improve the results. These findings can be used to research the role of trust formation in teamwork.