Cohesion Wins Games: What High-Performing Teams (Don't) Say

Want to win more games? Then your team’s communication and cohesion might matter more than you think. Both are known to be two strong factors that drive performance in gaming. But, are the two linked? Does communication influence cohesion and hence indirectly benefit performance?

🎙️ Why Teams That Talk Win More

"Without a sense of cohesion in the team... members are less likely to engage in... ‘teamwork’ that enables a team to function effectively." [1]

Team cohesion—shared bonds or attractions between team members that drive them to want to work, play, and stay together. Across the scientific literature, cohesion has been shown to have many benefits to teams. In the researchers' words: "Cohesion is not only important to team performance, but leaves members feeling satisfied and can increase team member retention." [1]

Similarly, communication is important for team performance too. I've touched on this link in three earlier episodes (here, here, and here). However, the connection between the two in gaming has not been explored yet. That's why the researchers asked two questions:

• "Is communication frequency related to team cohesion in digital games?" [1] In other words, does more or less communication benefit performance?
• "Are there potential communication sequences that could be explored as indicators of team cohesion in digital games for future work?" [1] Meaning, does team cohesion manifest in how the teams communicate?

In order to answer these questions, the researchers recruited 135 players from a place on the internet that is known to house the most based players on earth—the League of Legends subreddit. The players were ranked, ranging from Silver to Platinum. For the experiment, players were grouped into 48 teams with 33 teams having three study participants and two random players in them. During the games, the researchers collected all communication data (voice, chat, and pings). So, what did they find?

🗣️ Does Talking More Really Help?

"There was a significant correlation between team cohesion and match outcome; between team cohesion and satisfaction; and between team satisfaction and match outcome." [1]

This indicates that working together as a team made the teams win more and be more satisfied with their experience which, in turn, also benefited their win rate.

But what about the link between communication and cohesion? It was found that both are correlated too; more words per minute meant more team cohesion. You might also expect communication to predict wins, right? Surprisingly, that wasn’t the case. More communication was not significantly correlated with performance (match outcome), which is kinda surprising. It can be assumed that a certain amount of communication is needed to perform better, but too much talking/chatting doesn't help and may even be detrimental.

Regarding the second research question—potential communication patterns that indicate cohesion—differences between a high-cohesion and a low-cohesion team were found. The differences are shown in the image below.

As you can see, the team members that felt more cohesive: apologized, used humor and taunting, communicated more of their intentions (I'm going to do this and that), made more suggestions, greeted or said thank you, and had no disagreements. These are some indications about how gamers, in general, should communicate to improve team cohesion and, ultimately, win more games.

The high-cohesion team, furthermore, had a lower communication frequency (words per minute), but their communication was "more constant across the match duration compared to the low-cohesion team." [1] This is something every gamer knows. You’ve probably been there: the early game goes well, your support says “great engage,” and your jungle pings objectives. But after one bad fight? Radio silence. Everyone plays solo, and suddenly the game's slipping away. This makes sense because in these moments, (good) communication is absent.

🚫 Smart Chat vs. Tilt Talk

Communication sequences the high-cohesion team had:

• Suggestion → Agreement/Acknowledgement: If a suggestion was made, it was highly likely that the rest of the team would agree to it.
• Answer → Question sequence: "...in the high-cohesion team seems to suggest that this team engaged in more elaborate question and answer sequences." [1] Furthermore, all players answered when someone asked a question.

Communication sequences of the low-cohesion team:

• Opinion/Analysis → Opinion/Analysis sequence: After an opinion or analytic statement was made, players engaged in discussions. This also indicates that players disagree more often (Disagree → Disagree sequence) and fight to have it their way.
• Command → Disagree sequence: Commands from players were likely to be rejected.
• These sequences likely triggered the Frustration → Frustration sequence, reflecting frustration between team members.

📈 How Do You Improve Your Rank?

1. Say hello and thank you when playing with your team mates, apologize for a mistake you've made, tell jokes, let others know what you're going to do, make suggestions on what to do, try not to disagree too much.
2. Communicate what's necessary and avoid babbling.
3. Keep communicating even when things go wrong and your team is behind.
4. Avoid the low-cohesion communication sequences, mentioned above.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great week. Cheers,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Tan et al., 2022