Measuring the Impact of Cooperation in Halo: Reach

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. Here we make use of the data exposed through the public interface of a contemporary first-person shooter, HALO: REACH, originally intended to foster player community. We use this to investigate the extent of cooperation among player groups and the effect on individual player behavior. Our results demonstrate that players who enter as a group into the multiplayer matchmaking system have, on average, a significantly higher win-to-loss ratio than players who enter the matchmaking system alone. Principal component analysis of individual behaviors reveals a set of novel player types, adapted to the multiplayer context and quite distinct from player types found in other contexts. These data illustrate how player characteristics are strongly related to the actual game context, and show the impact of cooperative behavior on game design.