Collective Intelligence Outperforms Individual Talent: A Case Study in League of Legends

Gaming environments are popular testbeds for studying human interactions and behaviors in complex artificial intelligence systems. Particularly, in multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, individuals collaborate in virtual environments of high realism that involves real-time strategic decision-making and trade-offs on resource management, information collection and sharing, team synergy and collective dynamics. This paper explores whether collective intelligence, emerging from cooperative behaviours exhibited by a group of individuals, who are not necessarily skillful but effectively engage in collaborative problem-solving tasks, exceeds individual intelligence observed within skillful individuals. This is shown via a case study in League of Legends, using machine learning algorithms and statistical methods applied to large-scale data collected for the same purpose. By modeling and visualizing systematically game-specific metrics but also new game-agnostic topological and graph spectra measures of cooperative interactions, we demonstrate compelling insights about the superior performance of collective intelligence.