By Congo at Thursday, November 20, 2014 3:42:00 PM

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well known phenomenon within behavioral study circles. One thing we haven't discussed, and this may be a moment of revelation for many, is what this effect and it's proposal has on competitive gaming in the world. It's time we broke it down from development levels to professional and touched on a few soft spots for gamers.

What is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

Taken simply from our favourite source of information, Wikipedia, "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."



Theorized by David Dunning (the star of this article) and Justin Kruger, the two conclude: "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".



How this relates to gaming comes in their proposal for this phenomenon. The two proposed that for any given skill, incompetent people will:





Fail to recognize their own lack of skill. Fail to recognize genuine skill in others. Fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy. Recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they're exposed to training of that skill.

When researching for this piece, reading the theory and proposal, I felt as if Dunning and Kruger had done this study directly relating to gaming. Any body who has spent time playing games such as League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, well, any competitive game can sympathize with one another. I myself have been playing competitive games since I was about 13 years old (23 now) and am man enough to admit I used to suffer from the DKE.





The DKE and gaming

We were lucky enough to see an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on Reddit by David Dunning where he answered a whole host of questions relating to the DKE. One question in particular was brought to my attention. The question was asked by professional Dota 2 player Kurtis "Aui_2000" Ling.

Hey David, I'm a professional video game player in a game called Dota 2 and I am trying to start teaching people about the game. To give a little bit of background about the game if you've never heard of it, Dota 2 is a 5v5 game where mistakes from your team mates--as well as yourself--have the potential to heavily punish you and ultimately lose the game for your team.

Dunning-Kruger is often cited very extensively in Dota2 as one of the reasons for why it is hard for people to improve at the game, as well as one of the reasons for poor team cohesion in pick up public games.



My questions are:



Has any research been done about the effect of Dunning-Kruger specifically in videos games? What is the best way to try to teach people to combat the Dunning-Kruger effect in their games? Are there ways to even turn Dunning-Kruger into an positive force for learning? How did you get top billing on the name Dunning-Kruger? Has any research been done about how people view themselves morally when they're veiled by anonymity (i.e. on the internet on game forums) relative to their moral standard in person?

David Dunning replied:

No explicit research on the DKE has been done in video games, although I have to admit I am interested. You ask about Dota 2, but note that the same issue comes up, with potentially severe consequences, in flight training of new pilots. Beginning pilots are appropriately scared of the task. But, after a little training, they become more experienced and dangerous because they haven’t confronted all the problems they might yet. So, how do you expose trainee pilots to DKE without putting their lives in danger?

One notion is to let beginners know just how much better other pilots are performing. That clues them in that there’s a level of proficiency that they are not at yet. Then, one can give them clues about how to get there.

Oh, and how did I get top billing in the naming of the effect? Dunno. It does show that Justin Kruger and I did not provide the name. We don’t know how it happened, we just know that our good family names will be associated with ignorance, incompetence, foolishness, and the like far after we leave this mortal coil.

Taking David Dunning's response and relating it to gaming actually makes complete sense. The analogy of untrained pilots being exposed to those more experienced than them can be correlated to the recent exposure to competitive games via Twitch, and other online media sources. How you ask? When I admittedly suffered from the DKE I had absolutely no exposure to the outside world of gaming. I played on one server against the same people over and over, and obviously felt I was better than them. It was only until I was exposed to players much, much better than me (via own3d.tv and Justin.tv) that I learned just how poorly skilled I was.



To extend on the DKE and gaming let's take the 4 proposals and create a simple scenario in Dota 2 (possibly League of Legends too) that all of us are far too familiar with. A player joins the game, calls solo mid (possibly picks a fight with a player who called for the solo middle role as well) and eventually get's his role. He may start off well, but due to many reasons, starts losing his lane and begins blaming his team.

To extend on this scenario, let's take a trip down memory lane. We've all had this type of game.

He flames the other solo mid in all chat calling him, or bad, for receiving help in the form of rotations from other players in the game which inevitably loses him the lane. The opponents may be a bit better than him, which in turn resulted in him losing his lane. Does this stop him, though? Absolutely not. He continues to try crazy things and in turn gets himself, and his teammates punished in the game. After flaming his team, he continues to feed for the soul purpose of ruining the game now because it did not go the way he expected. Still stating he's much better than them and refers to a game where he actually did something useful, mentioning his rank and how it's better than theirs. After the game (or during) he realizes that even though his lane was lost the other lanes were performing quite well and all he had to do was keep his cool and hold his own. Realizing that his opposition number had a slightly better understanding and hence reviewing what he did wrong and improving. This final point unfortunately only comes with experience and is something players will begin doing once they've realized they're in need of improving.

Players now a days have plenty of exposure to more skilled individuals, the only issue is those players are professionals. When entering a game against players of similar skill there's really nothing stopping you from experiencing every single one of the thoughts proposed above. The question is, how do we stop this?





How does this affect gaming?

I'm going to draw from personal experience for this part. Growing up and gaming in South Africa, I personally feel we have been hardest hit by this effect. Sure, every single gaming community has it's demons, but ours in particular are due to many factors, which include poor internet infrastructure, little to no international exposure (until a few years ago) and small communities where only a small select few rise above the rest. The exposure some will argue isn't a factor, but it boils down to our poor infrastructure. Until about 2 years ago only a few privaledged household were able to watch streams of international games. Thus we were trapped in a void where we saw little to no improvement. In my unprofessional opinion this lent a hand to expanding the Dunning-Kruger Effect.



This interview with a South African team, Bravado Gaming, at MSI Beat IT earlier this month sums it up in a very harsh way.

Of course, the player didn't use the right words and as you can imagine there were a few heated debates with the gaming hubs in South Africa.



I had to preface this point with a bit of background, but now I can get back to how the DKE affects gaming. South Africa is at the grass roots of competitive gaming. We've sent 5 different teams to international tournaments in the last two months alone, which is massive for our little sunny country. The DKE puts a massive damper on the improvement of gaming down here. There are a select group of highly skilled individuals who practice countless hours to improve, and there has been major improvement, but the biggest problem lies within the casual community. Most public games become undesirable because players are unable to cooperate or enjoy a decent game against each other. There are always quarrels between players, more than often on the same team. This is where our biggest problem lies, because most new players who may be the next big pro get thrown into this deep end and drown in inadequacy. Sure, they'll eventually get out when joining the right circles, but imagine how much faster it could have happened if games went as they should without all the hot heads, game ruiners.

How do we combat the DKE?

This took a bit of thought and discussion but after reviewing David Dunning's response to Aui_2000, I figured the only way to improve is to take a similar approach. Introduce academies where younger players are exposed to professionals creating an environment of learning, as opposed to just jumping straight in to the competitive deep end. I honestly I feel this could help improve gaming as a whole. It's a bit of a dream but if we want to produce more quality players who posses more than just raw skill, I feel this is the only way.

Closing

Even thought I've mentioned a very small smudge on the international gaming community I'm sure a lot of you can draw similar comparisons. Maybe I'm wrong in assuming South Africa's small community lends a hand to a worse DKE. Perhaps a bigger community like in the EU or USA suffers even more due to large communities. My only hope is that Dunning and Kruger do perform research on this effect in gaming, helping gamers understand it and be more aware of their own actions.

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