Hello, Welcome to the talk on our paper “Understanding Tilt in Esports: A Study on Young League of Legends Players.”
My name is Minerva Wu. I'm 4th year PhD student at UC Irvine’s Department of Informatics.
I’m interested broadly in social emotional learning around game spaces.
When I started, I was looking at definitions of toxicity and this idea of tilt came up.
This project is an exploration of what tilt looks like for young players.
So first, what do we mean by tilt?
As a term, tilt originated from pinball where frustrated players would hit the pinball machine.
The machine flashed the word “tilt” and would end the game.
This term was adopted by poker communities in the 1980s/ 1990s
as an explanation for why poker players would continue to play when losing
and even make worse decisions.
Traditional sports carry on this meaning of tilt
by associating it primarily poor decisions when gambling and betting.
As adapted to esports,
tilt is associated with frustration, rage, and negative emotions
that in turn starts to negatively impact decision-making and gameplay.
Other researchers have highlighted the role of motivation going into play.
Some definitions emphasized repeated failures, losing streaks,
or the feeling of frustration when a player has tried really hard but doesn’t seem to get results.
In general, we refer to tilt as when a player gets emotional
and these emotions get in the way of making the objectively best play at any particular point in time.
Going into this project we had four main questions:
How do players define tilt for themselves?
What triggers tilt for them?
How do they respond?
And finally, do they see tilt as something they can change and get better at?
We called this last concept tilt malleability,
inspired by Carol Dweck’s concept of malleable versus fixed mindset.
We also had two a priori hypotheses:
Firstly, we predicted that different triggers would correlate with different responses.
Secondly, based off literature that students who saw intelligence as malleable were more likely to persist in the face of challenge and frustration,
we predicted that players who thought tilt was malleable would have a different response than those who did not.
Corresponding to these research questions we had open response items and final multiple choice item.
For each of the open response questions,
two researchers reviewed the responses to come up with a coding scheme.
One researcher applied the codes,
and everything was checked for internal consistency and coding drift.
For the interviews,
three researchers generated a coding scheme based on three transcripts.
The lead analyst then coded the rest of the transcripts.
For this study we surveyed students and staff
from the North American Scholastic Esports Federation (NASEF),
a high school esports federation where students can set up teams
and compete in a league with other high school teams.
NASEF has a presence in over 900 schools in the US and internationally.
We managed to collect 95 student surveys
and conduct 8 interviews with staff
before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic
and subsequent shutdown last March.
Just a little context on the game:
All of these students played League of Legends,
popular Multiplayer Online Battle Arena type game by Riot Games.
The game is played with five members on each of two teams, blue and red.
While the overall goal of the game is to take objectives and destroy the other team’s base,
players also have individual metrics for performance.
Each player’s performance and the team’s overall performance
relies heavily on their teammates,
whether it means communicating enemy positions or helping out others.
There are in-game chat and all chat functions,
as well as a nonverbal ping system to facilitate communication.
Results.
Firstly, we confirmed that players definition was consistent with the definition of tilt we saw in previous literature and cultural definitions.
Students did tend to emphasize the emotional component of tilt like anger and rage,
but the behavioral component, like being confused or deteriorating gameplay, came up in staff interviews.
Next, we looked at what causes tilt.
Most players were in some way triggered by other players:
their opponents, something doing poorly or someone saying something.
Students were also really hard of themselves and got frustrated
when they felt like they made a mistake or if they felt like they weren’t playing as well or doing as well as they knew they could.
How did players respond to tilt then?
A third of responses involved exiting the game.
This was a widely recommended strategy for dealing with tilt.
It’s not quitting in the middle of a game, but stopping after a game and taking a break,
maybe getting a snack or playing a different game.
The idea was to return to the game with a fresh mind.
A quarter of players had positive reactions to tilt,
where they actively tried to do something in-game to improve their emotions.
They’d take deep breaths and try to find out what went wrong and how to fix it without blaming anyone.
Another quarter of players responded negatively.
This is the highly dramatized image of tilt that involves screaming or slamming the keyboard
or lashing out at other people and saying rude things.
Finally, almost a fifth of students just did nothing, or as we called it “lump”.
In interviews with coaches, lumping was called the “sneakier side of tilt”
where instead of getting really worked up, players would just stop communicating.
They didn’t lash out, but they didn’t try to fix the situation
and would basically give up on the game.
Finally, two thirds of students and all of the coaches thought it was possible to change how easily someone gets tilted.
Breaking it down a little more, 12% of students said tilt was not changeable,
and 21% said they simply didn’t know.
We also confirmed our hypotheses.
First, different types of triggers do elicit different types of responses.
When other players were the cause, players had a mix of responses,
but primarily responded positively, trying to calm down and recollect themselves.
When frustrated by their own mistakes or losing though, they were split between negative responses and exit responses.
As mentioned, exit is generally considered a good strategy.
In poker, leaving the table was considered a good strategy for breaking even, even though they weren't winning.
Taking a break was also frequently recommended advice for dealing with tilt in the esports community.
As consistent with literature on intelligence malleability,
we also found that beliefs about tilt malleability did affect how a player responded to tilt.
Players who thought that it was possible to change how easily they got tilted
had a positive effect on how they responded when tilted, swaying them towards positive and exit strategies.
These hypotheses actually compliment each other.
These partial tables look at how trigger affects response while holding malleability constant.
We found that the same patterns hold:
When players believe tilt is malleable, they tend towards more positive responses
in all cases except for when dealing with themselves and their own frustration.
When players believe believe tilt is fixed, players tend to be more negative or simply leave.
Our biggest takeaways are that players are tilted most _commonly_ by their own teammates;
however, they were most _heavily_ tilted by their own performance and frustration
reacting the worst when mad at themselves.
Finally, believing tilt is malleable tends players towards positive responses.
Given these takeaways , we see a good opportunity for using tilt as an opportunity for social emotional learning.
Social emotional learning refers to an array of skills
related to managing oneself as well as interacting and cooperating with other people.
Managing tilt goes hand in hand with social emotional learning and self management
because tilt harms gameplay.
Preventing tilt or getting better at self management, social awareness, and relationship skills
is part of dealing with tilt, which is part of learning to play better.
Interviewed coaches are already working on this
and had a few strategies for managing tilt on their teams.
For example, they worked on changing individuals’ attitudes from just winning
to specific, immediate goals that they could do or improve.
They also encouraged players to always be communicating
and to be aware of how their reactions and could affect the team.
As one staff member said, “a lot of our students don’t really know how to be good losers.
"Esports, especially in high school and middle school, can really help teach gamers how to game correctly
and game properly and be good citizens of the world." Endquote.
This mentorship, and being able to be better gamers and better people through games,
is part of how esports and games can be part of social emotional learning education,
and also why I am personally interested.
Thank you so much for your attention today!
If interested, please check out our full paper in the CHI proceedings.
Also feel free to contact myself or JeSeok
and the other work we do in the Games Learning Society Center.
Thank you! :D