Country as a proxy for culture? An exploratory study of players in an Online Multiplayer Game

Relatively little is known about whether and how people from different countries play differently. Existing literature is still debating whether countries can serve as proxies for cultures. This paper is among the first to present a large-scale exploratory study (n = 14,361 from 107 countries) trying to validate empirically whether it is acceptable to utilize countries to group players of Ubisoft's Rainbow Six Siege, a popular online multiplayer game. We developed a survey collecting various player information, including demographics, habits, appreciation, and several psychological measures. Through a data-driven approach, this paper examines whether the variance in responses within users from the same country is less than the variance identified between users from different countries. If the answer is positive, then the approach of utilizing country as a proxy for culture could be justified empirically. The results show that players from the same countries respond to the survey in a marginally more homogeneous way than players from different countries.