Kind of an odd study...red vs blue!

Mai Valentine

Mai Valentine

Moderator
Source: 1up

Imagine if a competitive shooter -- say, Unreal Tournament 2004 -- was not an entertaining hobby but rather an elaborate statistical experiment: If you had to guess which team, red or blue, was more likely to win any given round, would you say it's a 50/50 toss up? If you did, you'd be off by a ten percent margin.
A report appearing in the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior (via the Associated Press) shows the result of just such a study, where 1,347 matches between "elite teams" in UT2K4 were examined. All things being equal, red team still won 55 percent of the time. It's an odd and seemingly inexplicable result, but neuroscientist Mihai Moldovan of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark had a theory: The color red may be a psychological distractor to men.

A separate study conducted in 2005 also showed the competitive advantage the color red may have, even in real-life sports. British scientists examined one-on-one competitions in the 2004 Olympic Games and found that athletes wearing red were more likely to win.

"While this is really an interesting analysis, the notion of red team versus blue team has been ingrained in the Unreal Tournament series for years. We don't anticipate any immediate changes to team colors," said Epic Games vice president Mark Rein. So there you have it -- whenever you have a choice between teams in a multiplayer shooter, and you're looking for any possible competitive advantage, always go with red
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I wonder if that's true in Halo 3 as well. XD!
 
So, taht means that each payer would only have an extra 1.25 percent of winning...

I like those odds! :D
 
hmmm idk i think i play better with blue (i always wear blue and my videogame characters do too)
 
I think its a statistical coincidence. If they tallied up another 1000 matches you might see it draw closer to 50/50, or you might even see it turn into Blue's favor.
 
stealth toilet said:
I think its a statistical coincidence. If they tallied up another 1000 matches you might see it draw closer to 50/50, or you might even see it turn into Blue's favor.
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where 1,347 matches between "elite teams" in UT2K4 were examined. All things being equal, red team still won 55 percent of the time
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Looks like they had both a good sample size and a statistically significant result. That margin is too big to be a statistical coincidence.
 
Grindspine said:
Looks like they had both a good sample size and a statistically significant result. That margin is too big to be a statistical coincidence.
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If it was truly a controlled experiment where "all things were equal" then it would be a clear 50-50. The fact that there was a slant one way or the other proves that either 1) all things were not equal, or 2) the sample size was not large enough for the law of averages to hold true. Clearly the people performing the experiment chose the first option and concluded that the team's color may have had an impact on the outcome, but as I said, I don't think it's anything more than a coincidence. The people playing the matches and their various skill levels and teamwork capabilities would be a more likely factor, but even if proper control groups in the experiment were created the statistic would still be meaningless because reality is not controlled.

So either the statistic is a product of poor methodology or its inapplicable to a real situation. In either case, the lack of a 50-50 result proves nothing other than the fact that the study was conducted at a time when red teams won an extra 10% of their matches.
 
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