While conflict in team-based competitive games is supposed to be between opponents, poorly considered design choices can spark fighting among team members. This fighting often gets reported as disruptive behavior.
Fortunately, the causes of team conflict are fairly predictable. We can take proactive steps to mitigate — and ideally even avoid — team conflict with these ten design heuristics:
1. Compatibility
The design should minimize the chance that teammates have competing goals, conflicts of interests, or clashing playstyles.
Tips:
- Ensure that mission and achievement systems aren’t creating competing goals between team members.
- Create paths for different kinds of playstyles, formal and informal.
- Offer ways for like-minded players to self-organize ahead of play and help happy teams stay together.
2. Acceptability
The design should establish and reinforce standards of acceptable social behavior.
Tips:
- Provide clearly defined rules for behavior and remind players regularly. Requiring commitment can have a powerful effect.
- Make prosocial actions obvious and rewarding for all. Encourage cooperation.
- Provide feedback for both acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
3. Responsibility
The design should tell players how to work as teammates to meet their objectives.
Tips:
- Establish clear, yet flexible, team roles. Provide information about how well players perform in these roles.
- Reward both individual and team performance. This incentivizes individuals while reinforcing the sense of “team.”
- Design for mutual accountability and ensure players are aware of this. Be careful with things like solo queues, which can prioritize personal outcomes of those of the team.
4. Ability
The design should support player development and learning.
Tips:
- Find ways to encourage learning and skill improvement as part of the game. Too much emphasis on winning can lead to unsportsmanlike behavior.
- Give players suggestions when they’re asked to perform new, challenging tasks in the presence of others. Can you help new players get good at just one thing?
- Consider sandbox experiences that allow players to practice key skills without burdening others.
5. Autonomy
The design should ensure players can control their experiences and get out of bad situations when needed.
Tips:
- Support players’ ability to leave games early without having an adverse impact on their teammates.
- Enable reporting, muting, and blocking. Make it easy to find these features.
- Provide players with information about their performance that helps them improve in subsequent games. The more progress they feel, the better teammates they’ll be.
6. Clarity
The design should facilitate good communication and expression of intent.
Tips:
- Make sure all methods of communication are clearly visible to players, easy to use, and encouraged.
- Develop tools for communicating intent (e.g., ping systems). This helps avoid intentionality bias.
- Consider systems that automatically call attention to players in need.
7. Scarcity (with care)
The design should be intentional about the distribution of limited resources.
Tips:
- Rewards players fairly in situations where teamwork was needed to overcome obstacles, like raids and rare monsters.
- Offer players a secondary role choice option when getting a primary role can’t be guaranteed.
- Find ways to compensate support players who are busy helping rather than earning.
8. Urgency (with a bit of help)
The design should alleviate (but not necessarily eliminate) pressure in timed experiences.
Tips:
- Simplify decision-making, especially where it affects collective outcomes.
- Make suggestions where high-knowledge is required. (You can also give players the option to turn suggestions off.)
- Create moments for teams to strategize ahead of important decisions.
9. Positivity
The design should bias teammates towards trust and empathy.
Tips:
- Visualize accomplishments, including reputations. Profiles, hover cards, and loading screens are all good opportunities.
- Show common ground. Have teammates played together before? Are they in the same groups or region?
- Kickstart engagement by suggesting something positive they can say to teammates at the start of a game.
10. Mutuality
The design should make every teammate feel like an equal and create a level playing field for all.
Tips:
- Create moments where all team members can be seen together as a team.
- Build voting systems that democratize decision-making.
- Avoid pay-to-win systems. These undermine team cohesion.
Now what?
- Explore even more methods for digital thriving.
- Discover other articles that share the core concept disruptive behavior.
References
- Batson, C. D. (2009). These things called empathy: Eight related but distinct phenomena. In J. Decety & W. Ickes (Eds.), The Social Neuroscience of Empathy.
- Bell, A. (2002). Six ways to resolve workplace conflicts.
- Levi, D. & Askay, D. A. (2020). Group Dynamics for Teams.
- Mladen L. (2022). Top 10 characteristics of effective teamwork. ActiveCollab.
