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

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.