I play a lot of Halo 5: Guardians at the moment, on Xbox. Most of the time in anonymous multiplayer, there’s a good amount of radio silence. Most people don’t have headsets, so there’s not a lot of team comms going on unless you manage to pre-organise a team.

I’ve also been watching some streams on Twitch. The communication is epic. There’s a whole host of callouts the skilled players make to their team.

  • Enemy position and direction
  • Enemy health status
  • Enemy power-up status
  • Their own status
  • Their own direction and intention
  • What weapons they’ve grabbed
  • What power-ups they’ve grabbed
  • And a host of other tiny cues.

Two paradigm shifts came out of this stuff.

  • I’ve started seeing multiplayer FPS games as a sick place to train team communication and on-the-fly tactical development.
  • I’ve started doing call-outs during online play, and it transforms the game level for me. When I have to call it out, I have to notice it, and the game becomes mentally taxing, and far more athletic in nature.
  • I’m going to continue developing this area, and I’m exited to see if I can get some tests done with team development at some point.