ArmA 3 Billeting as a Coalition Formation Game

The video game Armed Assault 3 (often shortened to ArmA 3) is part of a popular series of online military simulation role-playing games by Bohemia Interactive. Many players take part in cooperative organizations, with larger communities hosting 50-100 players simultaneously on dedicated servers. Prior to hosting a game session, players are assigned to roles corresponding to positions in a rank-based tree structure. Assigning players ("billeting") to the game-specific hierarchy happens before play, but billeting can take enormous effort and time to satisfy individual players' preferences over roles, levels of the command hierarchy, and individuals with whom they will interact. A stable assignment of players to their teams is integral both for their enjoyment of the game and the overall effectiveness of the team. Inspired by the existing coalition formation literature, we re-cast that pre-play activity as a coalition formation game and explore how various coalition formation algorithms perform on the billeting process using synthetic data.