Multiplayer Serious Games and Team Effectiveness: the impact of different media on team dynamics

Networking and team working are becoming the foundations of human performance in educational, organizational and recreational settings. Here, new communities of practice are being established to promote an engagement economy that will be able to foster innovation and success by sustaining collaboration and group effectiveness. Among the different technologies that can support these processes, Serious Games are acquiring a prominent role. By fostering continuous learning experiences blended with ludic and engaging affordances, Serious Games have in fact been able to shape new opportunities for individual and collective learning and training, showing a discrete effectiveness in different areas, such as education, industry, architecture, engineering, military and medicine. Further, serious games have been capable of influencing both individual and interpersonal experiences by fostering positive emotions, promoting engagement, as well as enhancing social integration and connectedness. That is why they can be considered as “positive technologies”. Despite the impressive growth of Serious Games applications, only a few of them have been tested and scientifically considered from an empirical point of view. Specifically, there is not much work reported concerning the effects of Serious Games on collaboration and team effectiveness, nor is there much evidence for the impact of different media on game-based team training. This works aims at introducing Mind the Game, a multiplayer decision-making serious game developed to create a socio-technical environment where the interconnection between humans and technology stimulate team effectiveness and cohesion. After being developed, the game was used in two studies. The first one, which included 95 subjects, aimed at providing a systematic investigation, evaluating the potential of digital game technologies compared to paper-based applications not only on individuals, but also among groups. This allowed our research to focus both on subjective game experience and group dynamics, like team cohesion and team potency. Results showed that people who played the digital version of the game experienced higher level of immersion and positive affects, as well as lower negative feelings than players who experience the paper-based version of game. No differences in terms of performance were observed between the two groups. The second study compared the performance of groups playing the game in face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC) settings. Here, the impact on emotions, flow and team effectiveness were considered on a sample of 100 subjects. Results showed that groups who played in CMC settings experience higher levels of negative emotions and lower team cohesion. Moreover, a textual analysis based on the Functional Category System highlighted that computer-mediated group decisions more closely resembled the general problem-solving process of problem definition, orientation, and solution development as group interaction progressed, while the face-to-face group interactions tended to follow a more linear sequence of interactions. Finally, group interactions in computer conferences were more task-oriented compared to F2F discussions.