A Serious Game Supporting Team Collaboration

Abstract This paper introduces a new category of games which could be ranked among collaborative games. This game has the distinction of being based on solidarity and collaboration rather than individualism and competition. It puts forward team spirit over the individual one and serves to enhance This device allows managers to develop collaboration skills and best practices, which improves their capacity to manage their teams.

Author Keywords Serious games;; collaboration;; team work;; learning.

ACM Classification Keywords H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces;; H.5.1 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Multimedia Information Systems;; I.4.8 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Scene Analysis;; K.4.2 [Computers and Society]: Social Issues.

Introduction Serious games are video games [1-­2, 7] purpose serious objectives [8], designed for training and educational purposes [1-­2], so they move beyond entertainment [7-­8] per-­se to deliver engaging interactive media to support learning in its broadest sense [8]. Thanks to their graphics and design, they are highly interactive. That is why they have found to

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, Feb. 23 27, 2013, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

ACM978-­1-­4503-­1332-­2/13/02.

Ikram Bououd TEM research center Institut Mines-­TELECOM, France ikram.bououd@telecom-­em.eu Imed Boughzala TEM research center Institut Mines-­TELECOM, France imed.boughzala@telecom-­em.eu

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be well accepted among the young generation and have recorded increasing demand. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in how video games can be used to support serious objectives such as learning, training, collaborating, and teaching in formal education environments. Indeed, video games have the potential to be a valuable teaching tool because they are immersive activities [4-­5]. In addition, organizations are interested in these games as they are practical and increasingly acceptable among employees. Further, they have a number of potential benefits such as improving social skills especially collaboration [3]. Since players can play together, some serious games could involve a collaborative dimension. Whereas, these games do not have as goal to learn collaboration skills and best practices. Here, there is a need of this kind of games to learn effective collaboration among a team. This paper is an attempt to address this gap and to introduce a new collaboration-­oriented serious game. It addresses the following research questions: What are the objectives and characteristics of this new game? How could we develop a collaboration-­oriented game? What are the specification steps?

Literature review Two studies have targeted games teaching collaboration. Toups et al [10, 9, 11] and Song & Kleinman (1994). The first research targeted an instrument that teaches team coordination in firefighting context [6]. This game is not a 3D serious game, but a game focusing only team coordination skills. While the second research is targeting a DDD (distributed, dynamic, decision-­making) simulator for team decision-­making experiments and job scheduling[9, 11]. This game is not a 3D serious game, but a simulator developed on UNIX environment. The

current game is more interactive since it has 3D graphics, and in the same time, it targets collaboration skills and best practices. The game presented in this paper could be particularly useful for companies mainly in project management. In this specific context, several conflicts could occur for sharing resources within or cross teams.

The collaboration oriented serious game Requirements analysis: The game aims at making players evolve until forming maximum capacity to collaborate and they will effectively communicate, reach shared understanding, and adjust their tasks and behaviors to produce high quality outcomes. In this step, we have identified and analyzed game objectives. This step allows the verification of the adequacy between pedagogic objectives of the game and its available content. Game goals and scoring are provided in the margins.

Proposal of the game design: The game offers different collaborative scenarios between IT project managers. Players share common resources (budget/human resources) under the constraint to deliver final products in a specific time specified by the game. This project management problem may arise in any company generally IT consulting ones. The game provides three project managers Maya, Yannis and Adam who will play together to manage a set of five projects. Indeed, every manager will choose one or two projects between the five available ones. Later, the player will select the required staff for each project. As the resources are scarce, specifically the total number of project member or budget, project managers should share these common resources. Project members can be simultaneously assigned to

Game Goals

Show interest in collaboration: o Explained in rules.

Raising the spirit of collaboration: o Increase communication

between players. o Better rewards for

collaborative actions. Increase team cohesion: o Players are caring about

other playand suggesting support.

o Develop community spirit within the team.

o Develop a shared sense of identity within the group.

Better take advantage of collective intelligence: o Resolve a problem

collaboratively. Learn to collaborate while having fun: o Resolve a serious

problem. o Having fun when playing.

Share resources, risks and benefits: o Winning when helping to

achieve o projects in time.

o As much as a player better manages his/her project(s), (s)he will help others to manage their shared resources.

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three projects maximum. Every project contains as a set of activities, and each activity has a load in man/day. Project managers will try to collaborate by lending/borrowing budget and staff members. Indeed, the main goal of the game is to make all projects progress and be achieved in time. Then, collaboration between project managers will be a crucial rewarding criterion at the individual level.

Game steps Step 1 This step can be summarized in a set of instructions explaining the game rules. The game will introduce the context of the company (number of projects, budgets, penalties and the role of collaboration between players). After that, the player will choose his/her game parameters such as the project manager that (s)he wants to play (Maya, Yannis or Adam). We can summarize the game classes in the following UML class diagram (see figure.1).

Figure 1. Class diagram of the game

Step 2 The player chooses profiles of staff members to recruit basing on their coherence with project tasks. Some staff members could be chosen to work in other projects with other managers. According to the staff choice, other players could react usually when the staff skills are incoherent with the project. Through this step, players learn how to implement an optimal selection of resources;; they will learn to take into account the adequacy between tasks and staff

quality. In addition, they will learn how to handle relational aspects mainly in negotiation and dialog. Players will learn to care about osatisfaction which leads to strengthen the collaboration process.

Step 3 The player will produce a GANTT plan and dispatches tasks on different staff members. This diagram should respect s of resources. Players should reduce risks by doing a reasonable estimation of project requirements. In this step, players should learn how to manage their schedules in the aim to respect the timeliness of the project. Step 4 In this step, players will launch their projects and learn how to collaborate. They should exploit every opportunity and ask for help when there is a resourceinsufficiency. They should suggest assistance to other

In addition, they should identify repetitive tasks and reduce them to save time. The game provides a real time interface describing all project(s) parameters and showing all notifications. A pop-­up window could appear

Scoring categories

The scoring contains two categories: Displayed points: these points are related to the following scoring criteria: Timeliness, quality of the product, relationship with staff members and exploitation of resources. They will be displayed for the player in the aim to encourage him/her.

Hidden points: This score is hidden. The player will not know it until the end of the game. It is directly related to how collaborative the player is (related with the first scoring criterion: collaboration with other managers). The player will know from the beginning of the game that these points are the most valuable. Consequently, (s)he will try to collaborate as much as (s)he can, and it will better if they remain hidden. Every collaborative action has its own score;; for example, a player may be rewarded when (s)he suggests a solution for another player, but (s)he will be better rewarded when (s)he lends a resource for him/her.

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to the player bringing some suggestions which could assist him/her to manage a given situation.

Delivery of a first prototype: An example of scenarios The player chooses Adam as project manager. He will manage two projects. After, the player will select a number of staff members (shared human resources). We assume that the number is 11. Knowing the total number of project members (25), the other project managers will react against this choice because it will lead resource insufficiency). The game will alert Adam about the dissatisfaction of Yannis and Maya, and it will propose 3 options (see Figure 2). Adam chooses to negotiate and reduce the number of staff members to 10. The other project managers will know about this choice through the notifications sent by the game.

Figure 2. Scenario of choosing engineers

After this negotiation, the player will assign a number of staff members on each project and prepare his/her schedule.

Figure 3. Screen shot of an option provided by the game

Conclusion We are iteratively enhancing the current version by removing bugs until having a bug free version. We aim at developing a game version dedicated to team members. We are scheduling to test the game with management students, and later with managers in a professional context.

References [1] Felicia, P. Digital games in schools: A handbook for teachers, http://games.eun.org/upload/GIS_HANDBOOK_EN.PDF [2] Kebritchi, M., Hirumi, A. & Bai, H.,, The effects of modern mathematics computer games on mathematics achievement and class motivation. Computers & education, 55, 2 (2010), 427-­443. [3] Mitchell, A., Savill-­Smith, C. The use of computer and video games for learning: A review of the literature, http://gmedia.glos.ac.uk/docs/books/computergames4learning.pdf.

Scoring criteria

Players will be rewarded according to five criteria ordered from the most important to the least important: Collaboration with other project managers: Checking the amount of collaboration between project managers (number of assistance given with or without negotiation). So a project manager will be rewarded if the project of another player is finished on time and with a good quality because (s)he contributed in its success.

Timeliness: Checking if the projects are delivered according to the schedule.

Quality of the product: Checking if there are no activities ignored or given to inadequate project members.

Relationship with project members: Checking if there are no dissatisfactions between staff members such as working on inadequate tasks or working during the weekends.

Exploitation of resources: Checking if resources are optimally dispatched and managed during the game (no waste of time, budget, human resources and minimum of repeated tasks).

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[4] Shaffer, D., How Computer Games Help Children Learn. 2006, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. [5] Smith, R., Game impact theory: the five forces that are driving the adoption of game technologies within multiple established industries. Games and Society Yearbook, 2007. [6] Song, A.A., and Kleinman, D. L., A distributed simulation system for team decisionmaking. in Fifth Annual Conference on AI, Simulation, and Planning in High Autonomy Systems, IEEE, (1994). [7] Sorensen, B.H. and Meyer, B. Serious games in language learning and teaching-­a theoretical perspective. in Proceedings of the 2007 Digital Games research Association Conference (2007). [8] Stone, B. Human Factors Guidelines for interactive 3D and Games-­based training Systems Design, www.eece.bham.ac.uk/Default.aspx?tabid=154.

[9] Toups, Z.O., Kerne, A., and Hamilton, W. A., The Team Coordination Game: Zero-­fidelity simulation abstracted from fire emergency response practice. ACM Trans. Comput.-­Hum. Interact., 18, (2011), 1 23. [10] Toups, Z.O., Kerne, A., and Hamilton, W. A., Game design principles for engaging cooperative play: Core mechanics and interfaces for non-­mimetic simulation of fire emergency response. ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Video Games, ACM Press(2009), 71 78. [11] Toups, Z.O., Kerne, A., Hamilton, W. A., and Shahzad, N. Zero-­fidelity simulation of fire emergency response: Improving team coordination learning. in The annual conference on Human factors in computing

(2011).

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