Collective Intelligence: How Team IQ Boosts Esports Performance

Did you know that teams have something called 'collective intelligence' (CI)? Me neither, until I read this study on how CI can impact gaming performance. Let's see what it is and what is does.

❓ Why it is important?

As you can probably imagine, collective intelligence exists only in groups of people. "[It's] a group's capability to perform across a wide range of tasks" [1], meaning if you're 'on the same page' as your buddies, you can have better performance not just in-game. It is something like an index of group-level competence.

It is assumed "that... CI is built upon some combination of individual members’ attributes and group structures, processes, and norms." [1]

To investigate if this collective intelligence is linked to performance in gaming, they collected data from players such as play history and performance metrics (provided by Riot Games). They also had the players fill out an online questionnaire and do tests. In total, 248 teams participated.

📊 What are the results?

"CI had a significant, positive effect on both MMR at the time of the study and MMR 6 months later, after controlling for individual play time and team play time." [1]

In essence, teams with a higher collective intelligence (CI) will have a better chance of winning. Interestingly, the researchers also projected that this is also the case for at least 6 months later. The figure below shows the results for different League ranks and CI.

Beyond CI predicting a team's future in-game performance, teams that stick together longer gained the benefits of CI, but not those who disband quickly. More specifically, if you only play solo queue with strangers, you only form temporary teams. However, if you play with your friends on a constant basis, CI will kick in and make you a better performing team.

"[Lastly, ] we also find that CI is positively correlated with the presence of a female team member..." [1]

In other words, if at least one woman was on the team, CI may have increased — "may have"? Yes, may have, because it's only a correlation (more women = higher CI).

🥡 The Takeaways

If you now think that, in order to improve your rank, you'd just have to play more with your buddy, you're probably mistaken. Yes, playing with the same people over and over again builds CI, BUT: if you queue up in duo queue or team, you will likely face players who also gained the CI-buff. However, you may gain an advantage by including one of your female friends in your team (you surely have female gamer friends, right?).

Hope you have a great Sunday (start of you week),

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Kim et al., 2017