Riot Games has contributed to a psychological research on gamer behavior by providing the researchers its 2013 post-game player data. On another news, Riot Games has recently unveiled a major patch for its League of Legends, which would drastically change one's gameplay.
Psychologists at the University of New York have recently conducted a psychological research regarding player usernames in relation to their anti-social tendencies. This prompted the League of Legends to be one of the subjects which could provide evidences of autism, sociopathy, or addictive personalities. Riot Games, in turn, has provided almost 500,000 data points which include usernames, in-game behaviors, and gamer reactions, as reported by Yorkshire Post.
Being one of the most popular computer games, as Medical Daily commented, League of Legends is capable of providing data which could represent all the active accounts on a single day. The researchers focused on player's usernames in relation to the game's Honor and Report features. Honor is the in-game acknowledgement of positive behaviors which makes a great gaming experience, including helpfulness, friendliness, teamwork, and honorable opponent attributes. Report, on the other hand, enables players to mark players with inappropriate behaviors such as the verbally abusive, or those who refuse to communicate with teammates. The study found that pseudonyms with negative connotations has the more tendency of displaying antisocial behaviors while those with positive connotations showed good relations with other players and tends to be the team leaders. The study further revealed that negative pseudonyms are more evident in relatively younger players.
In another news, it is said that Riot Games has unveiled a huge patch which affects the champions and the gameplay to be equal in measure. Accordingly, Game Designer Greg Street commented that for him, the game is something that is difficult to learn and impossible to master. As International Business Times commented, League of Legends will "never be the game you expect it to be".
Accordingly, the research was the first one to use such method to examine player interaction in a multiplayer online battle arena, hoping that the research might be able to use videogames to test personalities.
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