UC Irvine

Much of team communication is a trained process for teams in high pressure environments, like the highly regimented checklists that structure aircraft takeoff and landing. Elite esports teams use communication to maintain tight coordination in the face of chaotic and stressful stimuli, closely resembling behavior of high performing teams in domains seemingly is similar from competitive video games. This 2 x 2 factorial design explores differences between in-game communications in League of Legends teams that vary in both experience as a team and expertise with the game. The findings describe how content, style, and amount of communication differ between novice and expert teams; whether those differences relate to experience with the game, experience as a team, or both; and whether differences in communication relate to team performance under pressure. This work demonstrates methods that can be built on to explore whether these same communication patterns and solutions can effectively transfer across domains in the interest of training for safety and performance in higher consequence contexts.