Collective Efficacy in Games

Remember my “spoiler alert” on my first blog post? Well, I’ve tried to bite my tongue on talking about games too much but I just can’t hold it in on this topic. So here we go.

Many popular multiplayer online games rely on encouraging and growing collective efficacy of players through team-building. Games like League of Legends and Overwatch (both multiplayer battle games) let players pick specific characters with certain abilities and playing styles in order to complete their objective. (I won’t bore you all with the specifics, but I’ll provide a link here to some of the main player types here.) Depending on player preference and amount of practice, players will discover which character/fighting style they “main” (choose to play the most frequently/develop the highest self-efficacy for playing well); however, as this is a multiplayer game, the level to which you perform with certain characters is measured by how it helps your team, not just yourself. The easiest example of this is demonstrated in the fact that both of these games provide experience points for not only accomplishing goals on your own, but also helping others in your team to do so. Therefore, it is not uncommon for players to form regular teams consisting of players who main characters/roles that compliment each other well. In these games, teamwork is key and can make or break the outcome; the tactical decisions required to complete the objective means that each player needs to know what the others are capable of, which therefore allows the players to pick battles wisely, help each other when necessary, encourage each other as friends, adapt to new opponents/situations efficiently, and communicate well. While it is possible to jump into games with a randomly chosen team, it is often frustrating to do so as there is little measure of collective efficacy of a randomly distributed team; no matter how high your own self-efficacy is at playing, collective efficacy is necessary to confidently complete the objective.

As Quinnan mentioned in her post, collective efficacy can be demonstrated in both formal/academic environments as well as informal ones. It requires an environment where everyone has skills that they are highly self-efficacious in that they can bring to the collective table that contribute to completing a goal. However, it is easy to do this with games that take 20-30 minutes each as opposed to group projects that can require a lot of persistence and skills are more varied. Balancing these variables within a classroom or the workplace is the big challenge to tackle.