Virtual Team Building Games

Overview

Dynamic distributed teams are increasingly common in today's enterprises, but working remotely is a major challenge. Can 3D virtual worlds help make distributed teams more effective? We have built games in a virtual world that aim to improve trust, cooperation, and team cohesion at-a-distance.

Our Second Life island provides a diverse set of cooperative games with business value that distributed teams can play together. Each game is designed to provide opportunities for teamwork, participation from all players, role playing, and leadership. The island also features a commons, homes, stores, and more, all designed to facilitate the development of community around the games, and team development over distance.

The games have been used in engagements ranging from a large multinational bank to a middle school summer camp. We are currently undertaking a large scale study of the games inside IBM.

Games & Community

Our island features a variety of team building games and community features, designed to facilitate the development of a variety of teaming skills. Some examples:

Crossing the Ravine

Your team sets out to explore the world and encounters an obstacle: a ravine that appears impassible. Fortunately, each of you has an object that, when connected with the others, forms a bridge that spans to the other side. You must negotiate with the other team members on the placement of the pieces in order to cross the ravine and continue the journey.

Tower of Babble

The team is given a set of blocks with varying geometry. They take turns placing blocks on top of each other until the structure falls. It might sound simple, but achieving the ever-elusive top score requires teamwork, strategy, and leadership. Inspired by the classic game Blockhead, Tower of Babble adds a cooperative twist that rewards collaboration among team members.

Castle Builder

Ever work on a team where you couldn't see eye to eye? In this game, you take on the role of a designer or a builder. The design team lays out the floorplan for a castle. The build team is charged with implementing that design. The twist? Only the designers know the design, and only the builders can move the huge castle pieces to make the build happen. This means the only way the castle can be completed is for both sides to communicate, cooperate, and make adjustments along the way.

Community

All our games are situated in a community context, which provides a place for distributed teams to develop bonds outside of gameplay. The space includes a clubhouse for each team, stores with furnishings for those clubhouses, a town square, a cafe, and more. In addition, the community features scoreboards featuring the top scores for every game. The literature shows that teams gel particularly well when faced with an external threat and seeing that another team just beat your high score is just that kind of threat.

What People Are Saying

"The games help you learn how to problem solve together, how to work as a team. How to take lead roles. How to take direction from others."

"I was reminded how specific we must be in communicating our work and how we must account and include many different perspectives."

"I think it is a good way for new teams to certainly get to know each other and how they can work together"

"The games are very neat for building camaraderie...and teaming overall."

"I think it also naturally exposes certain characteristics of each of the team members such as leadership, creative thinking, out-of-the-box thinkers, etc."

"It reminded me of a virtual version of those corporate retreats where everyone goes off together and works on games that don't appear to have any corporate value at the surface but do on so many levels."

Video

If you have an IBM login, a video overview of the project is available on Cattail.
There's also a language translation video available.

Publications

Jason B. Ellis, Kurt Luther, Katherine Bessiere, Wendy A. Kellogg. "Games for Virtual Team Building." Proceedings of ACM DIS 2008 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, February 2008.

Wendy A. Kellogg, Jason Ellis, John C. Thomas. "Towards Supple Enterprises: Learning from N64's Super Mario 64, Wii Bowling, and a Corporate Second Life." Position paper for Supple Interfaces Workshop at ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2007.

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