Group-Level Cohesion Ratings Across a Fixed-Order Individual-to-Multiplayer Gaming Paradigm: An Exploratory Study

Background and Objectives: Comparisons between individual and multiplayer gaming can reflect social context, but in a fixed-order design condition cannot be separated from order-related effects. This exploratory study therefore focused on group-level Group Cohesiveness Scale (GCS) ratings across a sequential paradigm in which individual play always preceded multiplayer play. A study-specific OpenPose posture-consistency metric and a device/software-derived beta-band output from a small EEG subsample were retained only as ancillary exploratory observations. Methods: Sixty healthy young adults (mean age, 21.21 ± 3.07 years) completed the individual condition first and the multiplayer condition second in 10 assigned groups of six, separated by a one-hour break. GCS scores were averaged within each group, yielding 10 paired group-level means. OpenPose recordings from all 60 participants were summarized descriptively because participant-level paired values required for inferential reanalysis were unavailable. One randomly selected participant per group wore a NeuroSky MindWave Mobile 2 device (n = 10); because the exact eegID processing pipeline and artifact-control procedures were not retained, this output was treated only as a device/software-specific ancillary metric. Results: Mean group-level GCS ratings were 18.13 ± 0.55 after the first, individual condition and 23.55 ± 4.17 after the second, multiplayer condition (mean difference, +5.42). The retained statistical summary reported p < 0.0043; because the original SPSS output is unavailable, 0.0043 is treated as an upper bound rather than an exact recoverable p-value. Using the arithmetic mean of the two condition SDs as the standardizer, Cohen’s d_av was 2.30. Mean OpenPose posture-consistency scores were 97.13 ± 2.90 and 93.25 ± 6.24, respectively; this comparison is descriptive only. In the ancillary EEG subsample, the retained software-derived beta-band values were 34.55 ± 12.92 and 47.56 ± 15.33 a.u. (p = 0.022; Cohen’s d_av = 0.92), but the physiological source of this difference cannot be determined from the available methodology. Conclusions: Within this fixed sequential paradigm, the second, multiplayer condition was accompanied by higher group-level GCS ratings, but the difference cannot be attributed specifically to multiplayer interaction because condition was completely confounded with order, time, familiarization, anticipation, fatigue, and repeated-task effects. The OpenPose and EEG observations remain ancillary and hypothesis-generating and do not support causal, attentional, engagement, or cortical interpretations.