Exploring Compatible Interaction Preferences with a Puzzle Video Game

Abstract

As social beings, humans pursue happiness by craving to foment and maintain fulfilling so-cial relations, a need that transcends from personal into professional life and that leveragedthe study of psychological factors that can influence teamwork processes and outcomes.Following this tendency, the present work studies how the pairing of people with distinctinteraction preferences influences their acquired ability and experience while training to-gether. For this, a puzzle video game namedAlien Barwas deployed and used to evaluate31 pairs of players(n= 62). The results demonstrated teamwork benefits of includingself-oriented and challenge-oriented subjects, and that care should be raised when joiningothers-oriented characters. Additionally, interpersonal closeness influenced subjects’ ex-perience at the perceived competence level, but not their enjoyment which may instead re-late to task affinity. These findings may help develop instructor-driven and automatic groupmanagement, otherwise dependent on possibly inaccurate subjects’ judgements alone.