Building Interpersonal Skill Profiles for Players in Competitive Team-Based Online Games

Abstract

The world of esports has seen rapid growth in the past decade. Despite this rapid growth, non-technical skills, such as communication, in a competitive team-based environment are an understudied topic, even though professional players, experts, and the esports community alike, do agree that non-technical skills and team dynamics affect the performance and potential of a professional esports team. Other research fields, where high-pressure teams play a central role, have realised the importance of non-technical skills, which led to the implementation of various methods to measure these skills. These methods can be applied to the esports industry as well due to the similarities between teams in competitive team-based online games and high-pressure teams in sectors such as the military, aviation, and emergency services. In this study, interpersonal skill profiles were defined based on methods used in these other fields. Participants were recruited whose data were collected. These data were then cleaned and manually labelled. Afterwards, interpersonal skill profile scores were defined based on literature from related fields and domain knowledge. These scores were then calculated using quantitative measures derived from the input data and visualised to allow the comparison of players' non-technical skills. Lastly, an automatic labelling model was trained using the manually labelled data to automate the entire implementation. The results showed that the profiles were able to differentiate between players based on their non-technical skills, and that there is potential in applying team dynamics related methods used in other research fields to the world of esports.