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CHI '26 · Honorable mention · full-paper review · confidence medium-high

Change is Hard: Consistent Player Behavior Across Games with Conflicting Incentives

Emily Chen , Alexander J Bisberg , Dmitri Williams , Magy Seif El-Nasr , Emilio Ferrara

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This is a solid CHI honorable-mention style paper because the contribution is clear, the dataset is substantial, and the cross-game design is genuinely useful for separating player-level consistency from single-game effects. The main value is methodological plus empirical, not a sweeping theory shift.

Axes Lens

Rare contribution shape, typical evidence profile. The point here is not a score. It is to show what kind of claim the paper makes, and whether the evidence pattern is unusual or baseline in this 268 -review set.

Review Summary

This paper’s strongest contribution is that it asks a familiar question in a better way: instead of inferring player flexibility from one game or from different cohorts, it follows the same players across two competitive environments with conflicting incentive structures. That makes the central finding more persuasive than a typical single-title telemetry study. The result itself is interesting because it pushes against the intuitive expectation that players should fully adapt to each game’s reward structure; instead, the authors argue that individual agency and stable tendencies remain visible across contexts. In CHI terms, that is a meaningful empirical contribution to the broader debate about whether behavior is primarily shaped by systems or by people. The paper is also well aligned with its evidence base: the claims are observational, the sample is large, and the novelty is clearly in the cross-game comparison and the attempt to reduce self-selection bias. At the same time, the scope is bounded. The study is limited to two Riot titles, to competitive players who are active enough to meet the inclusion threshold, and to telemetry-derived measures that may not capture the full richness of flexibility. So I would read this as a strong descriptive and methodological paper with good external relevance for game analytics and behavior-change research, but not as a causal explanation of why consistency persists.

What Changed

Canon before

Prior work on player behavior and flexibility typically studies one game at a time or compares aggregate populations, which makes it harder to separate stable individual tendencies from game-specific incentives. The paper positions itself against that baseline by following the same players across two competitive games with opposing incentive structures.

Departure from common sense

It is counterintuitive that even when two games reward opposite behaviors for success, the same players do not simply adapt fully to each environment; instead, their flexibility patterns remain stable across games. That runs against a common expectation that strong incentive differences should dominate behavior.

Actual novelty

The paper’s main novelty is methodological and empirical: it tracks the same players across League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics to study cross-game behavioral consistency while reducing self-selection bias. That design lets the authors make a cleaner comparison than studies that only observe one title or different player pools.

Evidence

The paper analyzes gameplay decisions from 4,830 players who each played at least 50 competitive games in both League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. It operationalizes flexibility from end-game snapshots and compares cross-game behavior retention and consistency, concluding that players remain behaviorally consistent despite conflicting game incentives. The evidence supports a cross-game observational claim, not a causal intervention claim.

Limits

Method limits

The evidence is observational and based on telemetry from competitive play, so it supports association and consistency claims rather than causal claims about why behavior persists. The operationalization of flexibility from end-game snapshots may not capture all dimensions of player behavior.

Deployment limits

The study is limited to two Riot Games titles and to players with sufficient competitive activity in both games, so it may not transfer to other genres, less competitive contexts, or players with sparse play histories.

Boundary conditions

The findings are bounded by competitive settings, the specific League/TFT pair, and the sample of players active enough to meet the 50-game threshold in both titles. The paper also notes regional constraints from North American server data.

Manual check: Verify the exact limitation wording and whether the full paper explicitly states the North American server/API-rate-limit constraint in the same form as the stage-A packet.

Position in field

This sits at the intersection of game analytics, behavioral consistency, and agency-versus-structure debates. Its contribution is less a new interaction technique than a cross-context empirical argument that individual tendencies can persist even when systems incentivize different behaviors.

Abstract

This paper examines how player flexibility – a player's willingness to engage in a breadth of options or specialize – manifests across two gaming environments: League of Legends (League) and Teamfight Tactics (TFT). We analyze the gameplay decisions of 4,830 players who have played at least 50 competitive games in both titles and explore cross-game dynamics of behavior retention and consistency. Our work introduces a novel cross-game analysis that tracks the same players' behavior across two different environments, reducing self-selection bias. Our findings reveal that while games incentivize different behaviors (specialization in League versus flexibility in TFT) for performance-based success, players exhibit consistent behavior across platforms. This study contributes to long-standing debate about agency versus structure, showing individual agency may be more predictive of cross-platform behavior than game-imposed structure in competitive settings. These insights offer implications for game developers, designers and researchers interested in building systems to promote behavior change