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COMPUTER GAMES AS A TOOL TO ENHANCE REMOTE TEAM AND COLLABORATION EXPERIENCE

Authors:
COMPUTER GAMES AS A TOOL TO ENHANCE REMOTE TEAM AND
COLLABORATION EXPERIENCE
Karol Cagáň, Ján Papula, Lucia Kohnová
Faculty of Management, Comenius University (SLOVAKIA)
Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic was indeed a global game changer. It impacted literally every part of our
lives. The most notable part for most of us was the switch to remote work and collaboration. As
meeting rooms were exchanged for Zoom calls and office spaces for our living rooms, we settled in to
study the impact of remote working on our workforce. Initially the data coming in where excellent. They
showed up to 60% productivity jumps, more free time for employees. Meetings were suddenly starting
on time, and we saved on average more than 1 hour of our daily time commuting from work and back.
Companies started to cancel office leases and where slowly planning migration to permanent working
from home environment. However, as the pandemic drag on problems started to emerge. Mainly
integration of new employees into the working process became a huge problem and drop our rates for
new employees surged by as much as 30%. The main reason lack of communication, team interaction
and personal oversight. New employees were missing the presence on the workplace, they failed in
getting to know their new colleagues and felt lost under the load of new work left with just online calls
to provide guidance. With first remote freshman arriving University of Comenius where facing the
similar problem. To measure the effectiveness of various online integration tools and methods we
have designed a scientific experiment in which we tried to measure the level of student integration
achieved with the help of the most rapidly growing entertainment activity of our current time: gaming.
In our experiment we have randomly assigned 60 students to 8 member teams. Over the course of
two weeks two online classes where conducted. The experimental group of students that have never
ever met physically in their lives was tasked with playing what during the pandemic became the most
streamed game on twitch.tv platform Among US. A game oriented at cooperation that forced students
to personal interaction and communication. At the conclusion of our study we found out that students
noticed significant increase in trust between the team members. Students further rated that
interpersonal communication in the team improved rapidly during the two weeks. In our article we aim
to further analyse the impact and improvement of team abilities and cooperation in a remote team via
introduction of computer games as a teambuilding tool.
Keywords: Computer games, cooperation, team work, remote work, covid 19.
1 INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE OVERVIEW
Gaming is an activity which involves playing games in a digital environment. As of current epidemic
situation in most of the world online activities are becoming a more go to option for everybody, since
they are les prone to disturbance caused by further movement and contacts restrictions. A purpose of
this paper is to examine a relationship between classical teambuilding activities and their respective
online versions, and playing computer games as a form of teambuilding and cooperation activity.
Remote working is yet another trend that gained significant momentum during current situation. As
well as gaming it is done in virtual environment. As main purpose of our study we aim to identify how
can gaming help improve working performance, with special emphasises on remote working.
1.1 Gaming and esports
Ever since the beginning of first computers and their user interface people started to use the new
instruments to have fun and play games (1). The first games were simple but the variety and types of
games begin to grow shortly after, fuelled by player engagement and by the fact that playing computer
games was fun (1). Nowadays gaming and esports is a multimillion dollar business with its net global
turnover crossing one billion dollars (2). Reaching out to almost half a billion viewers in 2020 it’s a
phenomenon that simply can’t be ignored, and one that slowly slips to every aspect of our lives,
including our working environment (3). Gaming and esports did not go unnoticed by the researchers
and experts as well, who tried to figure out its impact on players. Lot of scientific studies focuses on
perception of games and its impact on individual mostly in health and behavioural spectrum. They
Proceedings of INTED2021 Conference
8th-9th March 2021
ISBN: 978-84-09-27666-0
9877
Cagáň K., Papula J., Kohnová L. (2021) Computer Games as a Tool to Enhance Remote Team and Collaboration Experience. Proceedings of the 15th
International Technology, Education and Development Conference, INTED2021, IATED. ISBN: 978-84-09-27666-0, pp. 9877-9882
mostly analyse plausible corelation between violence and various other behavioural deficiencies and
regular gaming experience.
1.1.1 Effects of gaming on cooperation in work environment
Our aim is to look at gaming and esports in relationships to learning and helping develop teamwork
abilities. Scientific study found that games can be a motivational factor in high school students and
increase their motivation to learn (4). Furthermore study concluded that gaming related learning was
significantly more attractive to students than traditional learning (4). In addition cooperation based
computer games have been shown to provide significant increase in cooperation among subjects that
engaged in cooperation gaming activities (5). Furthermore there are patterns in online cooperative
games that can be compared to classic societies, and that through creation and fostering of common
ties build engagement and loyalty to online gaming community (6). Moreover games used and
designed to educate employees have shown a significant contribution to increase in work engagement
as well as decrease in stress from work (7). Additionally, workers that where using games to train work
situations found the gaming experience funny and engaging and overall rated the experience positive
(7).
From our study and experimental overview, we can therefore conclude that gaming and esports
boosts teamwork, most notably if cooperation games or games centred around creating groups or
societies are concerned. We can also conclude that gaming activities are funny and engaging and
carry a general positive perception by the subjects of gaming related experiments which is a fact that
is persistent in all cases analysed for the purpose of our overview. Additionally, gaming also increases
learning experience and learning motivation. Based on these findings we can formulate our initial
hypothesis that exposing university students to gaming as a form of teambuilding activity will increase
their communication and teamwork. We can also assess, based on the conducted studies that
students will find the gaming activities more engaging and funnier that traditional teambuilding
activities and will have an overall positive perception of the gaming in education process.
1.1.2 Gamification and players motivation to engage
Another plausible relationship between computer games and motivation for players is gamification.
Gamification is usage of competition elements with aim to boost cooperation and team performance
(8). Gamification however is not based mainly on computer games but on the human aspect of
competitiveness and on human motivation to achieve set out goals (8). Gamification and its elements
have been shown and verified by multiple experiments to significantly boost cooperation and
engagement among teams (9). Although gamification started as early as 1908 with badge system of
American scout organisation, it did not became popular until console games infused millennials
entered the job markets (10). The spread of computer games ant its competitive and cooperation
elements strongly based on gamification made gamification more noticed and arguably way more
popular (10). Currently computer games and analyses of gamers behaviour serve as a great testing
ground to test and discover new gamification elements to implement in real world (10). From the
analysed studies we can therefore conclude that gamification is a significant contributor to
performance and cooperation increase at the workplace and argue that computer games based on
same principals can have similar impact on subjects of gaming at workplace.
1.2 Remote working and team cooperation
When we encounter a complex problem and need number-wise or skill-wise diverse group of people,
we need to form a team to cooperate. Since the team is formed to fulfil a certain goal or task it must be
managed. The way team is managed and formed has impact on its performance the ability to fullfill
its designated task (11). One of the most important contributors to team performance is team
dynamics (12). Among other significant contributors to team performance belong setting up
responsibilities, tasks and communication systems (11). These systems and rules can be set either by
a model or theoretical framework, or from our own experience and knowledge of the team and its
composition (12). Overall we can conclude that the exact setup for team rules and methods of
cooperation makes for less grey areas and leads to a healthy setup (11). While experience in working
with the team, cultivating interdependence and cooperation further contribute to increase of
performance in a healthy team (12). Some underlaying eventualities for a working team are therefore
set up in advance and some are a matter of getting to know each other and getting to work together.
These factors of cooperation and communication can according to our previous study be reinforced by
exposure to computer games.
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Second vital aspect of remote team is the remote working environment itself. Some of the key
specifics of remotely managed teams include setup of processes and implementation of key online
management tools to facilitate these newly setup processes (13). One of the key factors in relationship
to remote teams is members perception of IT and online team management tools and their tolerance
towards them (14). Studies have shown that people familiar with IT technologies in general and with
positive relationship to remote technologies have significantly higher team performance while working
in remote teams (14). Building a familiarity with remote and IT based collaboration tools and with tech
in general can therefore be a great contributor to boosting team’s performance. Once again this can
be achieved by positive experience that computer games generate. Furthermore issue that is
especially important in remote teams and can have measurable impact on performance is trust (13).
Trust building should therefore also be a part of our online gaming activities in order to achieve
maximal plausible impact on performance increase in remote teams.
To sum up in our overview and literature analyses we have identified key areas of teamwork and
collaboration and several challenges posed by working from home in an online environment. However,
we can conclude that some of the specifics necessities for a better performing online team can be met
by a wide variety of benefits offered by computer gaming.
2 METHODOLOGY
In order to conduct a successful experiment an analyses of available game titles and theory of gaming
engagement is necessary. To make us able to choose the correct game title for the experiment
because game title as well as play style has significant impact on the result of our experiment (5).
2.1 Game selection
In order for a game to be based on the theory and mechanics of gamification it should include
elements like play and choice in which the game should offer a player freedom to plan and execute its
actions in a relatively flexible way (15). Furthermore it needs to provide a space for reflection and
careful consideration of players action and thus a space for empowerment and subsequent reward
(15). As we can see gamification is an important component of games, since players motivation to
play can be divided in two categories, one is the motivation for play itself (16). This motivation is
derived from gamification aspects of the game (16).
Another motivation that is important for the player to enjoy the game is its engagement and its strength
(17). Apart from gamification effects the design of the game is part of the motivation of the player to
play a particular game not just any game (16). Game engagement is a strong contributor and strongly
corelates with players enjoyment (18). In other words the more the player is engaged in the game the
more he enjoys it (18). In order for a game to be engaging and for the player to feel connected to the
game he needs to gain competence in playing the game (17). A further study shows that the simpler
the game is, the easier it is for players to increase their engagement (18). Furthermore, the game
must be intuitive and include a natural onboarding process to further maximize engagement (17).
Based on the criteria of engagement and gamification we have selected Among US. The game
concept revolves around 4 to 10 players trapped in a common place. Each player needs to complete
its predefined tasks in order for the team to win, or alternatively they need to get rid of all imposters
(19). On the other hand imposters job is to try to sabotage the players activities and to kill all the
players before they manage to complete their tasks (19). However, to give players a chance, players
are able to vote on ejecting their colleagues whom they suspect of being an imposter from the ship.
The game is simple, easy to understand and to onboard and it provides all the necessary effects of
gamification that were identified in our study as plausible contributors to increase in remote team
effectiveness.
2.2 Comparison methodology
For facilitation of the experiment, we have opted for two stage validation. In the initial stage of the
experiment published in this research, we divided 120 students in two groups. The main group and the
control group. It should be noted that students never met before and never collaborated on any form of
team task. The students where further subdivided into smaller groups - would be teams of 8 students
each. One half of the teams did a traditional online warmup and teambuilding centered around
introduction, talk about hobbies and many other things. However, the teams in the main group where
instructed and asked to play our selected game title Among US.
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In our initial stage we aim to compare the feedback from students who play the game and whom did
more of a traditional getting to know each other. By interviews and by collecting written feedback we
aim to analyze how engaged they felt in the game, how easily they got on board, and how do they rate
their cooperation. The initial stage will consist of mainly qualitative analyses with a quantitative
analyses of team performance and questionnaire done afterwards in the second stage.
3 PRELIMINARY RESULTS
After the conclusion of the gaming phase of the experiment we where able to do a quick qualitative
assessment of student’s performance. We summarized our views and observations from the entire
process and from guiding the students through the experiment as well as material from personal
interviews with students and of records of their accounts as well as their feedbacks.
3.1 Overall adaptation and onboarding
In order to verify our game choosing based on engagement and gamification hypothesis we need to
assess the onboarding process of students and how easy it was for them to start the game and get to
know all the features. For convenience students were given a short manual describing how to create a
game a connect with each other. But no instructions were given on how to play. Majority of student
teams faced connection issues and trouble getting the internet working and game installed. However,
the other members of the group where helpful in meeting those requirements.
Regarding the game itself, most teams started playing the game between 10 to 15 minutes after
connecting to discord servers. The most common issues where creation of custom game and pairing
all team members to one particular game. However once connected students where able to move
easily around the game and to navigate. On average one game was needed for each group to
familiarize themselves with the game and afterwards they where able to play game to its full extent
and enjoy all the features. We also noticed that in some groups in which at least one student was
present whom had a prior exposure to the game title, the game unfolded even more smoothly. And
even the first game went more or less without any trouble or learning and could already be counted as
enjoyable by the students. On average students without prior experience with the game ended up
onboarding after one full game cycle (about 10 minutes). Teams where at least one member was
familiar with the game ended up onboarding at the beginning of the first game and had no trouble
playing. Over the course of the experiment, we registered no complaint based on a student being
unable to play due to not understanding the game. The only students that where unable to participate
where deterred by technical issue with their devices or internet connection.
From the side of adaptability and learning curve we must conclude that the game was picked in
accordance with our best knowledge and fit the experimental conditions well. The game was easy to
play which resulted in 100% completion rate in the experiment. We must therefore conclude that the
choice of game was adequate, and we recommend using Among US for further experiments even with
subjects unfamiliar with computer games in general.
3.2 Enjoyment, engagement and satisfaction level
On the engagement side of the experiment results also confirmed our initial expectations from picking
the game title. Students find the activity funny and engaging at the same time. We noticed
spontaneous appreciation and positive feedback to the activity, which is not very frequent among our
first-grade students. Our initial fear of non-gamers not enjoying activity did not materialize, on the
contrary some non-gamers tended to enjoy the activity more than actual gamers, since the experience
was more novel and exciting for them. Overall, we noticed some students from the control group trying
to slip to the main group in order to be able to play the game which we overall rate as a very positive
sign. After debriefing with the students two of the gaming groups even confessed on playing the game
in their free time outside the scope of lessons and school duties, citing engagement of the game as
well as a motivation to get to know their classmates as a primary reason. We must admit that this
might have been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that students newer met, however to
back up our claims according to our debrief and interview no teambuilding or any extracurricular
activities where conducted in the control group.
We must therefore conclude that from the subjective point of perception, students greatly preferred
gaming in comparison to the traditional online teambuilding activities. These claims where further
reinforced by their actions and by some groups taking extra time to play the game with their team even
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outside the guideline of the experiment. However contrarily to our expectations non/gamers claimed to
have enjoyed the activity as much as, if not greater than gamers.
4 CONCLUSIONS
To conclude the initial phase of our experiment we have successfully identified the key elements of
choosing an ideal game for the experiment, including engagement as well as easiness of adaptation.
The experiment fulfilled our goal of providing an enjoyable teambuilding activity for students and
confirmed our expectation of students preferring gaming to other kinds of activities.
In order to continue with the evaluation of the experiment and to mathematically confirm our
hypothesis we suggest realising a quantitative analyses in which we will assess students subjective
rating of team performance in key areas identified in our study such as trust building, communication,
coordination and others. Furthermore, over the course of the experiment we will aim to objectively
assess the performance of teams in the experimental versus the performance of teams in the control
group in team related tasks. By the proposed analyses we can confirm or disprove our hypothesis that
playing games not only subjectively increases performance in teams and provides for a much more
enjoyable team activity in comparison to traditional teambuilding activities, but that it also drives
statistically significant increase in team performance.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was supported and funded by the VEGA: 1/0792/20 Examination of Changes in
Management of Companies in Slovakia in Connection to Industry 4.0 Transition.
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Cagáň K., Papula J., Kohnová L. (2021) Computer Games as a Tool to Enhance Remote Team and Collaboration
Experience. Proceedings of the 15th International Technology, Education and Development Conference, INTED2021,
IATED. ISBN: 978-84-09-27666-0, pp. 9877-9882
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Work-related stress is a large occupational risks in the Netherlands but interventions to reduce this risk are not implemented in organizations. The characteristics of a serious game make it a useful training tool for managers to raise awareness on their role in stimulating work engagement and managing work-related stress. In this research project a serious game for managers is developed and implemented and will be evaluated as an intervention to reduce work-related stress and raise work-engagement among employees. The evaluation will be done in a longitudinal case-control study, using a generic, standardized evaluation framework for validation of serious games. Focus of the evaluation will be on the direct effects of playing the game and on long-term effects, cf. transfer of training. In this paper the development of the game and the design for the evaluation study will be described.
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Purpose – To evaluate a proposed prescriptive model for the design of effective combinations of performance goals and pay-for-performance plans for the performance management of teams. Design/methodology/approach – The idea underlying the model – in which task, goal, and reward interdependence and their fit play a dominant role – is that a pay-for-performance plan should support the team goals and the goals of individual team members as well as support the way in which team members need to cooperate. To obtain a first notion on the model's validity, it was applied to evaluate a pay-for-performance plan for management teams at a large IT company. This evaluation consisted of an in-depth study of three management teams, using a case study methodology. Findings – Combinations of fit among type of team, performance goals, and pay-for-performance plan (established by a fit between the interdependence constructs and/or by an overlap in the content of the goal and pay indicators) are more effective than combinations of misfit. Research limitations/implications – The case study was limited to intra-team interdependence relationships and did allow for a analysis of the separate effects of a fit between the interdependence constructs versus content fit. Practical implications – This study shows that pay-for-performance plans should not be designed in isolation, but rather in alignment with performance goals and existing task interdependencies. Originality/value – This is the first study to investigate the three inter-dependence constructs in conjunction in a field setting.