A MODEL FOR EVALUATING ONLINE GAME PLAYERS: A STUDY OF ENJOYMENT, INTERACTION, FLOW EXPERIENCE, AND MOTIVATION TOWARDS ATTITUDE AND INTENTION BEHAVIOR IN CHINA

The purpose of this research is to find out the factors that affect online players. This study's variables are human-Game Interaction, utilitarian motivation, hedonic motivation, flow experience, perceived enjoyment, attitude, and intention. The researchers observed these variables and put forward four hypotheses to determine the influencing factors. The researchers used China's "League of Legends" as the research model. 300 respondents select this data through a questionnaire survey on two large-scale communication platforms in China. The first platform is the official forum of "League of Legends" in China, and the second platform is the most used game social software "QQ" in China. ". The researchers used convenience sampling and judgmental sampling to investigate. All data were analyzed using statistical software, and linear regression and multiple linear regression were used to find the most significant factors affecting players’ attitudes and intentions. Use descriptive statistics to provide average and demographic percentages. Besides, the researchers use inferential statistics to test the effects of variables. The results show that human-game interaction has a significant positive correlation with utilitarian motivation and hedonic motivation. Utilitarian motivation, hedonic motivation, flow experience, and perceived enjoyment have a positive impact on the player’s attitude. However, flow experience, perceived enjoyment, and attitude have no influence on the intentions of online player

Toward Successful Esports Team: How Does National Diversity Affect Multiplayer Online Battle Arena Video Games

Today, esports teams in multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games are often composed of players from around the world. The paper asks whether a greater national heterogeneity of professional esports teams means their higher effectiveness. Desk research data of 13 tournaments of Dota 2 game held in 2011-2018 is used to calculate the teams’ win ratio, i.e., the ratio of skirmishes (in all matches) won to the total number of skirmishes (match is a series of skirmishes). Hence, effectiveness is understood not as ranks or matches won, but as the lowest possible number of lost skirmishes. Multinational teams achieved a higher win ratio, compared to nationally homogenous teams and the analysis includes the role of coaches’ nationalities. Working groups, cognitive diversity, and similarity/attraction theories are used to signal potential reasons and consequences of diversity on team performance. This exploratory study indicates future research threads on esports teams’ national diversity

Do Influencers Influence? -- Analyzing Players' Activity in an Online Multiplayer Game

In social and online media, influencers have traditionally been understood as highly visible individuals. Recent outcomes suggest that people are likely to mimic influencers' behavior, which can be exploited, for instance, in marketing strategies. Also in the Games User Research field, the interest in studying player social networks has emerged due to the heavy reliance on online influencers in marketing campaigns for games, as well as in keeping players engaged. Despite the inherent value of those individuals, it is still difficult to identify influencers, as the definition of influencers is a debated topic. Thus, how can we identify influencers, and are they indeed the individuals impacting others' behavior? In this work, we focus on influence in retention to verify whether central players impacted others' permanence in the game. We identified the central players in the social network built from the competitive player-vs-player (PvP) multiplayer (Crucible) matches in the online shooter Destiny. Then, we computed influence scores for each player evaluating the increase in similarity over time between two connected individuals. In this paper, we were able to show the first indications that the traditional metrics for influencers do not necessarily apply for games. On the contrary, we found that the group of central players was distinct from the group of influential players, defined as the individuals with the highest influence scores. Then, we provide an analysis of the two groups.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 202