Why Players use Pings and Annotations in Dota 2

Jason Wuertz, Scott Bateman, and Anthony Tang. (2017). Why Players use Pings and Annotations in Dota 2. In CHI 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , 1978–2018. Acceptance: 25% - 600/2400.

Abstract

In many multiplayer online games, success often relies upon tight coordination between teammates. In Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), two gesturing tools are provided to facilitate communication and coordination: annotations – freely drawn lines on top of the gamespace – and pings – a combination of animation and sound indicating a point of interest. While Dota 2 players make frequent use of these tools, there is little information about how and why people use them in an effort to win games. To gather this information, we performed two complimentary studies: an interaction analysis of game replays, and a survey of experienced players. Our findings include: six distinct motivations for the use of gesturing tools; when and how frequently gesture motivations occur during games; and, that players find pings an essential tool for winning. Our findings provide new directions for the design of gesturing and communication tools in collaborative games.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2017-chi2017-dota2.pdf)
URL (http://chi2017.acm.org)
Video ()
DOI (http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025967)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wuertz2017dota2,
  author = {Wuertz, Jason and Bateman, Scott and Tang, Anthony},
  booktitle = {CHI 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems },
  title = {Why Players use Pings and Annotations in Dota 2},
  type = {conference},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2017-chi2017-dota2.pdf},
  videourl = {},
  url = {http://chi2017.acm.org},
  doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025967},
  year = {2017},
  pages = {1978--2018},
  acceptance = {25% - 600/2400}
}