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Investigating the Relation Between Playing Style and National Culture

In this article we examine playing styles in four popular massively multiplayer online games, namely, Battlefield 4, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, and Destiny. We investigate to what extent national culture influences these playing styles, and whether players from countries with similar cultures exhibit similar playing styles as well. We gathered playing style information from hundreds of thousands of players of these games, and applied correlation and clustering algorithms to relate playing styles to nationalities and to Hofstede cultural dimensions. We found that playing styles are influenced by nationality and cultural dimensions, and that there are clear similarities between the playing styles of similar cultures. In particular, the Hofstede dimension “Individualism” explained most of the variance in playing styles between national cultures for the games that we examined.