Familiarity in Team-Based Online Games: The Interplay Between Player Familiarity and the Concepts of Social Presence, Team Trust, and Performance

Team-based gaming is now among the most popular forms of gaming, with games like League of Legends and Dota 2 attracting millions of players around the world. It is generally held that playing digital games with friends offers a different gaming experience to strangers. However the interplay between familiarity and social presence, a core experience in shared virtual environments, has yet to be thoroughly explored. This paper presents the results of a user experience survey of 821 gamers, which aimed to explore the interplay between familiarity and social presence. The results showed an interplay between familiarity and the social presence players felt with their team-mates, however this interplay varied across the various games in this study.

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