Games for virtual team building

ABSTRACT

Distributed teams are increasingly common in today's workplace. For these teams, face-to-face meetings where members can most easily build trust are rare and often costprohibitive. 3D virtual worlds and games may provide an alternate means for encouraging team development due to their affordances for facile communication, emotional engagement, and social interaction among participants. Using principles derived from social psychological theory, we have designed and built a collection of team-building games within the popular virtual world Second Life. We detail here the design decisions made in the creation of these games and discuss how they evolved based on early participant observations.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Computer-supported cooperative work; Synchronous interaction; Collaborative computing

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
Second Life, distributed teams, distributed work, games, teambuilding, virtual worlds