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.

翻译：本文探讨了玩家灵活性——即玩家愿意尝试多种选择或专注于特定策略的倾向——在两种游戏环境中的表现：《英雄联盟》（League）与《云顶之弈》（TFT）。我们分析了4,830名在两款游戏中均至少参与过50场竞技对局的玩家的游戏决策，并探究了行为保持与一致性的跨游戏动态。本研究引入了一种新颖的跨游戏分析方法，通过追踪同一批玩家在两种不同环境中的行为，有效降低了自选择偏差。研究发现：尽管两款游戏为基于表现的成功设定了不同的行为激励（《英雄联盟》鼓励专精而《云顶之弈》倡导灵活），玩家在不同平台间仍展现出高度一致的行为模式。此项研究为长期存在的“个体能动性与结构约束”之争提供了新的见解，表明在竞技环境中，个体能动性可能比游戏强加的结构更能预测跨平台行为。这些发现对致力于构建行为改变系统的游戏开发者、设计师及研究者具有重要启示。