Categories
Uncategorized

How can game theory help Overwatch developers get players to cooperate as a team?

Overwatch is an online shooting game that focuses largely on team cooperation. Unlike other games where each player is somewhat independent and the strength of the team is roughly equal to the sum of the strength of all individual players, Overwatch is a game that demonstrates good strategy, planning and cooperation are far more important than the skills of individual players.

As a result, the designers must make crucial and innovative choices that can make the overall gaming experience feel friendly and welcoming rather than hostile. Previous games have attempted to combat the toxic environment by penalizing players who participate negatively, such as trolling in chat or playing very passively, but various approaches have not proven to be very successful because top players always have a tendency to look down on casual gamers.

The solution that the Overwatch developers came up with is brilliant because it makes use of game theory to direct players toward playing in accordance with the developers’ intentions. They decide to remove the scoreboard and add a play of the game highlight screen at the end of each match.

Scoreboard in LOL

Scoreboard in Rainbow Six Siege

Scoreboards are a tool used to provide players with information about each player’s statistics in the current match. Each player can see how they performed in the game as well as how other players performed because it is updated in real-time and the data is available to everyone in the game. Unfortunately, this leads to a problem where the best players now have a way to evaluate those who didn’t perform well, and casual players are thus discouraged from taking the team’s leadership and participating as a team.

The play of the game is an algorithmically selected video clip from the viewpoint of a player that highlights their best, most game-changing performance. The clip is shown to everyone at the end of the match, and it acts as an incentive for all players to work with others and try to perform a game-changing move.

play of the game

If we draw the payoff matrix of players in the game before the change and after the change, we can see an astonishingly interesting result.

before the change

after the change

Prior to the change, players had a dominant strategy of playing alone because it gave them a better chance of getting more kills and thus ranking higher on the scoreboard. Unfortunately, this is true for everyone, so the pure Nash equilibrium is in the cell with the lowest total payoffs.

Now, after the change, players would no longer want to purely get more kills as it would not show up on the scoreboard anyway. Instead, they now all want to be the best player and show up in the glory play of the game clip. This decreases the payoff of playing alone and increases the payoff of cooperating with others. As a result, the dominant strategy becomes collaboration and teamwork, which is exactly what the developers want.

 

Conclusion:

After analyzing these 2 interesting game designs from the perspective of game theory, it is evident that sometimes even a small game design change could affect the payoff matrix and completely change the way players play this game. Of course in the real world, things are far more complex than this, but I think the idea of analyzing player payoff under different behaviors and finding the pure Nash equilibrium can help developers make the right game design decisions.

 

Inspiration:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/the-story-of-overwatch-the-complete-jeff-kaplan-in/1100-6439202/

 

3 replies on “How can game theory help Overwatch developers get players to cooperate as a team?”

Wow, that is amazing! Since I have played Overwatch, League, and many other games listed in your blog, I can relate to the findings and the idea behind it. I definitely agree with the fact that after the change players are more likely to cooperate with each other since that is of more benefit to them in the long run.

I have also played all the above games and this blog post allowed me to see the games differently. I have definitely experienced a sense of selfishness or ego when playing games with scoreboards. Intuitively, I would think a play of the game would have the same effect but as you have stated it shows the opposite which surprised me.

As someone who plays one of the games mentioned (Overwatch 2), I completely agree with the idea behind this, since it would give players an incentive to play together with others and cooperate rather than be toxic which many players are these days.

Leave a Reply