Every day, millions of players connect and play together in team-based games: the patterns of cooperation can either foster or hinder individual skill learning and performance. Online games are modern-days natural settings in which cooperation strongly affects human behavior. Networks with high intensity and low inner centralization are, therefore, related to a higher performance as a team not only in traditional sports but also in computer mediated contexts.Ĭooperation is a fundamental social mechanism, whose effects on human performance have been investigated in several environments.
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After controlling for potential mixed-effects, such as the quality of the involved teams or their geography, this study reinforces previous research showing that team efficiency in the League of Legends professional scene is positively affected by the intensity of their interaction while centralization of resources is detrimental. Starting from a dataset consisting of 453.386 kill assists, the network structure and efficiency is assessed over 7.582 matches in total. In this article, networks will be used as a novel approach to understand how League of Legends professional players assist each other during a competitive match and to link their computer mediated behaviour and social interactions to their team's performance. Although this topic has been studied both in sports and management, research on computer mediated team interactions, communication, cooperative work and efficiency in online competitive environments is scarce. Teams can be defined by their interactions and successful performance rests on their members' behaviour. Our findings offer a new insight to game makers that suggests they should focus on motivating gamers' competitive engagement. Our study uniquely introduces three novel elements of competitive engagement namely, strategic, offensive, and defensive engagement-into the online gaming domain. Satisfaction of all needs is positively related to online gamer loyalty and game usage. Defensive engagement is positively related to relatedness need satisfaction. Offensive engagement is positively related to competence and autonomy need satisfaction. Our analytical results indicate that strategic engagement is positively related to competence need satisfaction. We collected data from 1543 online gamers and used structural equation modeling to test the model. Our research aim is to theorize the contextual features of online games, namely, competitive engagement, and build a theoretical model to explain how competitive engagement satisfies online gamers' needs and increases their game usage. This lack of knowledge prevents game makers from properly designing in-game competition functions. However, little is known about how competitive engagement satisfies gamer needs and builds their loyalty and game usage. Online games are popular digital technologies that enable gamers to engage in competitive play.