Good team-mates do more than help the team win

Abstract

When playing computer games with team-mates, players obviously place a lot of emphasis on achieving the team's goal and performing well. However, an additional issue is that team-members also care (to varying degrees) about how their team-mates feel about their involvement in the team's activities. What are factors that impact player decisions in team-mate games? The related work falls broadly into attempts to identify behaviors that contribute to better or optimal team performance -- and work that has studied emotional, cultural, and social factors that may cause players to make non-optimal choices or behaviors. This paper reports on work to identify some of the choices that team-mates make out of concern for the experience of their team-mate -- and to identify game features that correlate with these. Specifically, the paper analyzes six team-mate games in terms of team-mate concerns that appeared in the course of empirical studies involving the games. The paper identifies several team-mate concerns that players have, several game factors that correlate with these concerns, and shows how this explains differences in the presence of these concerns for different kinds of team-mate games.