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Player Control: An analysis of locus of control and rank in league of legends.

Infero·9/4/2014, 10:00:42 AM·6 votes·1,961 views

Imgur First of all, I'd like to thank everyone who participated in this survey! The data would not be here without you. o7

Initially, the purpose of this investigation was to explore possible differences in locus of control between ranks (bronze, silver, gold, etc.). But then I began chasing curiosities, adding in other variables concerning affinity for ARAM and Coop vs AI.

What is Internal/External Locus of Control? A person with an internal locus of control believes that he or she can influence events and their outcomes, while someone with an external locus of control believes outside forces are responsible for everything.

Why measure internal locus of control? An internal locus of control can be helpful for successful behavior change, which may have wide spread implications!

This survey breaks locus of control down into 3 sub-scales with scores from 0 to 48 and are based on a 7-pt Likert scale -3(strongly disagree) to 3 (strongly agree).

Some Definitions

  • Internal Locus of Control: One believes that he or she can influence events and their outcomes.
  • Powerful Others: An external locus of control scale; one believes that one's fate is controlled by other people.
  • Chance: An external locus of control scale; one believes that one's fate is controlled by chance.

Affinity scores for ARAM and coop vs AI are on a 7-pt Likert scale: -3(strongly dislike) to 3 (strongly like).

Graphing Choices: I chose not to set the Y-axis to reflect the whole range of possible scores (0 to 48 for Locus items and -3[strongly dislike] to 3[strongly like] for Affinity) in order to show a "more exciting" picture. This is a common media trick, thus I am adding a disclaimer: While the differences may look significant due to physical size, size does not in fact mean significance.

So what does the participant pool look like? N=132 (132 participants)

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If you remove non-ranked from the equation, you will observe a normal distribution or an approximation thereof. To be honest, I expected a funnel towards challenger. Thanks central limit theorem!

So what's internal locus of control look like across ranks?

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(ANOVA) F= 1.23 (p=.3)

So, no statistical significance here for internal locus of control. I would say that if this sample is a true representation of the player base that the scores reflect a healthy locus of control. Though the challenger rank comes in at 22.00, I wouldn't give it much weight due to the sample size of challenger (3 participants).

What this means: Seems most of the players surveyed take responsibility for the outcome of their actions! ... or recognizing that you forgot to activate Zhonya's and died because of it, thus your death is only your fault.

By Gender Average: Male = 32.5 Female = 31.96

What this means: Both men and women accepted their deaths equally... due to a failure to activate Zhonya's.

*** What does belief that control is in powerful others look like across rank?*** Imgur

(ANOVA) F=0.28 (p=.95)

While there are notably visual/numerical differences for powerful others, these are not significant. Based on this data, I would say players in general occasionally attribute their fate to others.

What this means: "Sometimes it's my teams fault when I initiated and died, they just walked away." When in fact you just tried to 1v5 by yourself, at Baron.

By Gender Average: Male = 20.31 Female = 23.19

What this means: Both men and women blame their team sometimes, when they personally perform poorly in game.

What does belief in chance controlling fate look like across rank? Imgur

(ANOVA) F=.63 (p=.71)

Again, no significant differences. Challenger once again is an outlier, but loses it's weight due to a N of 3. This notes once again a healthier locus of control as these participants seldom believe their fate is controlled by chance.

What this means: Players don't generally chalk up wins or losses to luck, but more so to personal performance.

By Gender Average:

Male = 18.01 Female = 18.46

What this means: Men and women believe that how they play, win or lose, that luck is generally not involved.

What does affinity for ARAM look like across rank?

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(ANOVA) F=.63 (p=.70)

No significant difference between ranking here! Notably, these are all positive scores, something one would hope to see for a permanent game mode. Interesting to me is the distribution.

What this means: People like playing ARAM in general....especially those diamond players!

Why do our Gold+ players increasing like ARAM as they gain rank?

By Gender Average: Male = .922 Female = .923

What this means: Everyone <3 ARAM....at least a little!

What does affinity for Coop vs AI look like across rank?

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This was an unexpected favorite in the analysis department. If you recall at the beginning of this post, Coop vs AI was me chasing a curiosity!

(ANOVA) F=4.45 (p<.001)

Significance! Interesting to me is the positive score for silver, and if you think back they had the most negative score for ARAM....Why? I'm Curious.

What this means: It's not me it's you! In most cases, as you climb in rank your love for AI just isn't the same. It's like you grew up and they never changed (but they did, just for you....you just don't care anymore).

Perhaps on some level we should expect these results over all, being that Coop vs AI is intended as training for pvp.

What comparisons were significant? Imgur

  • = significant

What this means: Generally, a "*" here signifies different stages of letting go of that old flame.

Non-ranked to Bronze = This just isn't working out.

Bronze to Silver = I still want to be friends.

Silver to Gold = Okay, now I remember why we broke up.

Gold to Platinum = Please, stop texting. I'm done with you.

Platinum to Diamond = I sorta forgot about you, nice catching up...but we have no future...so don't get any ideas.

Diamond to Challenger = I said NO FUTURE.

By Gender Average: Male = -.708 Female = .615

What this means: The guys dislike bots, Girls Like'em.

Thanks for reading this far! For me, this was a fun merger of psychology and gaming while diving into a rabbit hole of curiosities. The data collection spanned 1 week, I collected 133 responses and omitted one from analysis (that person left many answers blank). Keep in mind that the data is self-report and is subject to a number of threats to validity. I'd like to hope folks were honest (Summoner's Code!).

Again, I can't thank this community enough for participating in my research! If you have questions about the data please feel free to comment!

12 Comments

cshakes9/4/2014, 2:14:07 PM5 votes

I'd appreciate it if you told all of us what the numbers mean. For example, is .6 more or less favorable than -.7 etc.

Good work, and congratulations on reporting despite not making any huge findings.

redniwediS9/4/2014, 4:59:55 PM2 votes

Another fantastic post! Although I hope you don't feel pressured to keep these going I do look forward to seeing what comes next, either from you or from someone else.

PurpleKingCrazy9/4/2014, 8:29:47 PM2 votes

So I'm trying to grasp the understanding of this... but then again can you actually show the affinity between male and female players? I feel like the graphs show vague evidence between guys and girls "liking" a specific game.

The guys dislike bots, Girls Like'em.

You are strangely putting this at the end and I don't know why you kinda did that analysis without keeping a supportive content. When I read this, I was very confused of how you sum things up. Strangely enough, I really couldn't follow it from beginning to end without really knowing what I do to read them.

Your explanations are reasonable but your organization is kinda mixed up in the process. Can you try to clear up a few things?

Baitsa Dasuto9/27/2014, 12:18:53 AM2 votes

I've read through this and the female onboarding study and found it pretty amazing. From time too time there might be a bit of terminology I don't understand (before I google it), but all in all you do a pretty sweet job to explain things so they can be understood easily.

To be honest, though, I enjoyed the human component of your female oboarding study the most. To hear the Ryze player go from frustrated to giggling manically, or for Jinx to be so well liked is very cool. I really hope you and Riot have a future together, and I'm looking forward to your shopping study.

lorewise9/5/2014, 3:39:03 AM1 votes

This is interesting, but I think it's missing one crucial component: A survey over time. For this data to be meaningful I think you would need to track players from the beginning of their "career" in League to some future point. If for no other reason than to account for skill and the fact that bot games are viewed by many as a training ground. I think also if you're going to include something like gender, other info would be useful, like age and experience with games and mobas in general.

Also I don't see the relevance of gender on these statistics. I mean it's interesting but is it useful? It's pretty commonly believed that there are more men playing League than women (not accounting for transsexuals like myself). And I don't think it's too difficult to believe that many women who play simply avoid competitive modes because women historically are treated far worse for their mistakes in competitive games. And no, I don't think all guys are assholes or any of that nonsense, but there are numerous testimonials by women who game in this regard.

Personally as I've gotten older, (I'm 35), I care less about competitive games. I don't get the same enjoyment or fulfillment from "winning" that I did when I was 19. So typically when I log into LoL I'm going to pop into a Bot game because it's low stress and a manageable challenge. But also because I'm very methodical as a player and before I venture too far into ranked I'd like to have as much experience as I can with multiple champions and multiple roles. Even if in the end I'd rather just play support or jungle.