Why Riot should never implement voice chat

7. The prisoner’s dilemma

For those of you unfamiliar, the prisoner’s dilemma is a game theory exercise which goes like this:

"Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge, but they have enough to convict both on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is: If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves two years in prison If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve three years in prison (and vice versa) If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve one year in prison (on the lesser charge)."

Ultimately, the exercise inevitably concludes that, although it is in their collective best interests to cooperate and stay silent if each makes a rational decision they will each betray the other. Essentially, each individual rationalizes that, since they cannot control the other’s actions, their outcome will always be better if they betray the other (if the other remains silent, they will be set free, but if the other also betrays they will serve two years instead of three if they had opted to remain silent). Why does this matter to League of Legends?

The experiment is designed to show that two completely rational individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. League of Legends often shows us that five completely rational individuals might, similarly, not cooperate even to achieve their desired outcome of winning a game.

Because you don’t know the other players in your soloQ games, you cannot trust them to cooperate with the team and not “betray” by playing suboptimally. Therefore, it is always in your best interests to “betray” your team by playing selfishly, aka the oft-repeated advice to “carry yourself” out of your elo.

This mindset of not being able to trust our teammates to play cooperatively (and also not to misplay which would also destroy the cooperative goal) inevitably fractures the team and makes whatever communication we have pointless. Since you can’t trust your teammates, you ignore their calls unless they align with yours or the entire team collectively agrees to it. Adding voice communication doesn’t fix that.

This is proven by the one place where voice chat does work: professional play. Because professional teams play together consistently, they are able to trust each other to act for the benefit of the group rather than themselves. Similarly, the prisoner’s dilemma theory does not work when repeated with the same players, who will remember how the other acted.

Unlike the standard prisoner’s dilemma, in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma determines that the defection strategy is counter-intuitive and fails badly to predict the behavior of human players. Basically, when you play that game with someone, knowing you’ll play it over and over again with them, you realize that you both should trust each other by always staying silent because the other person will remember how you’ve acted. Pro teams, and teams that play together like the Twitch Showdown teams, use voice communication properly for this very reason: they know that they will be playing together, therefore, it is in their best interests to defer to the cooperative goal than their individual interests.

This does present the possibility that voice communication would work in high elos, where the player pool is smaller and the probability of playing with the same players repeatedly is very high. However, since there is no mechanism for ensuring the same configurations will play with each other repeatedly (e.g. dynamicQ) the players will fall back to playing selfishly. Essentially, they’ll figure out that there’s no benefit of working together with players if they might only be on a team with two or three of them again during this session.