Ping to Win?

Abstract

Non-verbal communication plays a large role in online competitive multiplayer games, as team members attempt to coordinate with each other without distraction to achieve victory. Some games enable this communication through "pings," alerts that are easy to activate and provide auditory and visual cues for teammates. In this paper, we review the literature on gestures and non-verbal communication and, through an empirical analysis of 84,489 players across 10,293 matches in the popular game, League of Legends, illustrate ping use in multiplayer games and test the impact of ping actions on performance in teams. We show that the amount of pings depends on player role and in-game activity and that pings by players have a positive but concave relationship with player performance. These findings demonstrate the importance of non-verbal communication and interruption on the performance of virtual team members. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for theorizing and designing sociotechnical systems that rely on users to engage in synchronous, collaborative work in shared visual spaces.