Instituto Superior Técnico

Exploring Compatible Interaction Preferences with a Puzzle Video Game

This study examines whether pairing players with complementary interaction preferences improves teamwork in Alien Bar, a cooking puzzle game, arguing that task-directed preferences, modeled along Focus (self versus others) and Challenge (facilitate versus complicate), have been understudied relative to personality-based…

• Thirty-one pairs (62 participants) played Alien Bar, a cooking puzzle game, through a roughly 35-minute four-phase procedure, testing whether complementary task-directed interaction preferences improve teamwork.
• Self-Challenger players achieved the strongest survival outcomes and helped their partners succeed, while Others-Facilitator players reported elevated perceived competence and Others-oriented pairings showed lower ability.
• Only one pairwise comparison, against Others-Facilitator partners, survived Bonferroni correction, so most of the preference effects should be treated as tentative.