Abstract

Cooperation is a fundamental social mechanism, whose effects on human performance have been investigated in several environments. Online games are modern-days natural settings in which cooperation strongly affects human behavior. Every day, millions of players connect and play together in team-based games: the patterns of cooperation can either foster or hinder individual skill learning and performance. This work has three goals: (i) identifying teammates' influence on players' performance in the short and long term, (ii) designing a computational framework to recommend teammates to improve players' performance, and (iii) setting to demonstrate that such improvements can be predicted via deep learning. We leverage a large dataset from Dota 2, a popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game. We generate a directed co-play network, whose links' weights depict the effect of teammates on players' performance. Specifically, we propose a measure of network influence that captures skill transfer from player to player over time. We then use such framing to design a recommendation system to suggest new teammates based on a modified deep neural autoencoder and we demonstrate its state-of-the-art recommendation performance. We finally provide insights into skill transfer effects: our experimental results demonstrate that such dynamics can be predicted using deep neural networks.

Date

October 19, 2025

Authors

Anna Sapienza, Palash Goyal, Emilio Ferrara

Journal

Frontiers in Big Data

Volume

2

Issue

14

Publisher

arXiv:1805.03285