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Playing With Friends Makes You a Better Gamer
An anonymous reader writes "Computer scientists at the University of Colorado and the Stevens Institute of Technology have shown that gamers that play with friends play better. The study used the blockbuster FPS Halo: Reach as a testbed, and combined ground truth data on friendships from an anonymous survey with data about the multiplayer competitions extracted using the Reach Stats API. They found that the more friends you have on your team, the more assists, the fewer betrayals, the more you score, and the greater the probability your team wins, and that this 'friends for the win' effect goes above and beyond the benefits of playing with skilled strangers. (They also show that older gamers are statistically better than younger players, contrary to popular opinion.) Study lead Prof. Aaron Clauset, writing on his blog, says that friends 'may be able to effectively anticipate or adapt to each others' actions or strategies without an explicit need for verbal (and thus time consuming) communication or coordination,' and 'these effects may be fairly universal, and not merely limited to the traditional domains like sports and war, where practicing together has a long tradition.'"
This just in: teams of people with mutually-known skillsets perform better than teams of people with no mutually-known skillsets. Film at eleven.
I honestly believe that I would have been faster at playing through the co-op modes of these games with a stranger than with one of my best friends. The number of times I dropped him (and him me) into the acid, grinding machine, flames or caught him (accidently!) with a rocket launcher is phenomenal.
We engage in friendly competition to find extremely creative ways of killing the other person that I'd never do to a stranger.
But don't forget - Life begins here, so twist the cap to refreshment and open happiness!
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