Collaborative Serious Games for Team Development
By Dr. Håvard Almås
Serious games, games with a purpose beyond entertainment, have grown in popularity over the last few years. What that purpose is varies, but for the most part it boils down to learning. More and more practitioners, researchers, and educators are becoming aware of the learning potential of serious games – providing an engaging experience that simulates real life. While there is now ample empirical evidence demonstrating that play can cause learning, even if the exact mechanisms and processes through which it happens remain somewhat unclear, play seems to have even more to offer. By adding true collaboration to the mix, where players absolutely depend on each other, serious games can transform into something beyond a tool for learning. In collaborative serious games, players can discuss and reflect on complex problems together, learning not only about the topic of the game, but also improving their capabilities as a team. In other words, play turns into a team development process where players engage in simultaneous team building and team training.
There are several potential benefits to using collaborative serious games for team development. Combining team building and training, commonly conducted as separate interventions, into one is perceived as more meaningful – because it is directly connected to training. Players improve their teamwork by solving the problems posed in the game together, learning who knows what, and how to work well together along the way.
Another major benefit is that serious games can be tailored to fit any context, utilizing the strengths of every player. Everyone brings diverse background knowledge and experiences to the table. Serious games can be designed for drawing these experiences and knowledge out, allowing equal opportunity to contribute within the process of play. Clearly, this is especially impactful when aiming to establish teamwork across departments. Play is also, by definition, an activity outside of the ordinary, outside of reality, and so provides a welcome break from routine for many – especially if played face-to-face around a game board rather than on a screen.
Over the last few years, I have researched how people experience playing collaborative serious games and what the process of play is like from a player perspective. This provides a complementary approach to most research on the topic which is largely focused on outcomes rather than process. The research was carried out as an industrial PhD project at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). The project was funded by funded by the Research Council of Norway and House of Knowledge AS, a Norway-based game design and capability-building company, who also provided the serious games used. Presented below are some key insights and practical implications for using collaborative serious games as an organizational development tool generally and for team development specifically.
Engagement and learning as co-emerging
One key reason for using collaborative serious games is that they afford an environment where engagement and learning are perceived as intertwined and co-emerging. People that sit down together faced with an unfamiliar challenge experience uncertainty, but often also curiosity and interest. In overcoming that uncertainty, a shared engagement arises which promotes team learning. Serious games can be crafted to supply just enough information that people feel the uncertainty but still manage to overcome it without getting too tired or frustrated – creating that all important shared mastery experience.
This process is especially rewarding when the game is perceived as a believable simulation of external reality. Then the experienced mastery and play can create a bridge from theoretical knowledge to practical application. Understanding how what you know translates to lived practice is both a powerful form of skill learning and a significant source of engagement. The co-emergence of engagement and learning are additionally reinforced both by group members helping each other spot connections and by facilitators guiding interaction when necessary.
Fostering reflection and sharing
Another key benefit of collaborative serious games for team development is that games can be designed to foster sharing of perspectives, preferences, ideas, values, and knowledge, all pertaining to the topic of the game. This ability to bring different points of view to the forefront and reflect on these differences lets players learn as much from each other as from the instructional content, setting collaborative play apart from most other approaches to team training.
Discovering and handling differences represent an important pathway for the emergence of collaboration, as players decide on ways to leverage their strengths and handle weaknesses both individually and jointly, incorporating diverse knowledge when tackling shared challenges. Taking individual and shared action to adapt to group needs is also facilitated by the game environment. People can hop into new roles at any time when they perceive a gap that needs filling in the group. Such adaptive action is especially prominent in player groups characterized by valuing heterogeneity of knowledge and personality. Groups that perceive diversity as opportune rather than confounding establish well-functioning collaboration.
Outside of real life
The fact that play happens outside of real life is a major contributing factor in setting collaborative serious games apart from most other team development efforts. Play provides a safe environment detached from real world consequences and established hierarchies. Everyone starts at the same level and you don’t have to worry about saying something “stupid” – it’s just a game! If you make a bad decision, it doesn’t really matter. If anything, you’ve learned not to make that same mistake out in the real world, where there are consequences.
A big part of the art when it comes to game design is to craft a narrative that is simultaneously outlandish and realistic. Outlandish in that it feels far enough removed from players’ day-to-day to not think of it as thinly veiled imitation of their company. Yet, it must be realistic enough that knowledge and skills acquired can be transferred back to the real world without much issue. Normally, this is achieved, in part, through a facilitator-led plenary wrap-up session.
Rapidly establishing teamwork
All the above actions and interactions combined in play fosters efficient establishment of teamwork, as well as effective teamworking. Everything is put in place for players to collaborate, and they must do so if they want to beat the game. Collaboration is of course still contingent on team composition or between-player fit, as would be expected, yet the play process is experienced as promoting teamwork despite varying personalities, skills, and knowledges. This is likely due both to how intertwined collaboration and learning are and to the way in which collaborative serious games are designed to account for differing competencies.
The benefits for establishing teamwork are seen especially in the swift emergence of team emergent states (TES), in other words, dynamic team properties that vary due to setting and context. TES include such states as team-level trust, cohesion, and safety – all of which appear to be rapidly emerging during the process of play. By quickly establishing TESs, a newly formed team may reach an operational level of collaboration quickly and an existing team may overcome barriers to effective teamworking. It is of course difficult to say for certain how or why TESs emerge, but the fact that aspects of interaction like vested interests and real-life implications are removed from the equation is certainly part of the answer.
Conclusion
Play matters! By allowing ourselves to take a step back from reality, something truly unique can be found. Collaborative serious games afford a form of interaction that is difficult to replicate elsewhere and may just be the perfect fit for a whole slew of different goals. If your goal is to build skills and know-how, create shared understanding and knowledge, or establish and improve teamwork, a collaborative serious game may be just the thing. Play is of course not a silver bullet to all things team development, but its unique properties make it more engaging, more enjoyable, and in many cases more impactful than other approaches.
If you are interested in learning more about this kind of serious games and what they can do for you, the doctoral thesis containing all mentioned research insights, and hundreds of additional sources, can be found in the NTNU Open repository.
Dr. Håvard Almås is an organizational development consultant, serious game designer, and researcher at House of Knowledge. He has a doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in work and organizational psychology, focusing on collaboration and learning in organizational development processes.