From iron to diamond: Collaborative behavior development across competitive tiers in League of Legends

초록

Understanding how individuals develop collaborative competencies in digital environments has become critical as work, education, and recreation increasingly occur through screens. This mixed-methods study examines collaborative behaviors across competitive skill tiers in League of Legends, analyzing 560,000 matches and conducting expert interviews. Quantitative findings reveal that collaborative behaviors-vision control, strategic communication, and assists-differentiate tiers far more strongly than individual performance. Vision control increased over 200 %, strategic communication increased 169 % with forward-looking signals showing the largest effects, and disruptive behaviors declined five-fold across tiers, while individual combat effectiveness remained flat. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that these dimensions developed as integrated systems, together predicting 87.3 % of tier variance. Expert interviews identified bidirectional selection-socialization processes where collaborative predisposition facilitates advancement and higher-tier environments further reinforce capabilities through stricter norms, peer modeling, and reputational consequences, with threshold effects around mid-tiers indicating qualitative environmental shifts. These findings provide large-scale behavioral evidence supporting Social Identity Theory, team cognition theory, and status characteristics theory in naturalistic digital contexts, demonstrate that teamwork theories require adaptation for fluid-membership environments with standardized communication tools, and reveal collaborative competence as integrated systems requiring holistic development.

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