Serious+Games

=Serious Games - Social Learning through fun at work =

Leoni had a great sense of fun and recognised the potential of team games to facilitate social learning. One of her recent projects that involved many others was the development of Go*Team, a computer-based team version of the traditional board game Go, used for strategy training by military for thousands of years. This game is engaging and challenging as social learning should be. Go*team creates an enjoyable learning environment for a wide range of work teams but it has been shown to be effective in developing shared situation awareness, cooperative behaviour, and the capability for self-direction. Keeping a balance of work and play is particularly important as the world of organisations is becoming increasingly complex. Social capital is a valuable but rare commodity in many human enterprises and its lack costs organisations billions of dollars in lost productivity. Organisations are often at a loss to get employees with different ideas and ways of working to work together. Cooperation among members of newly formed, cross-functional teams is difficult to achieve. Many management initiatives to counter this problem are costly and ineffective. Outward bound style retreats only suit some employees while touchy-feely sessions only appeal to some others. Our program uses a non-threatening online gaming environment embedded in a group learning program whereby all organisational employees can comfortably learn the skills to behave cooperatively and productively in teams. The game, and the programs within which it is used, is the result of several years’ research into cooperative behaviour and shared situation awareness in military and civilian teams of the Australian Defence Organisation. At the core of the program is Go*Team a purpose built online team-based version of the traditional strategy board game, Go. Go*Team is an on-line micro-world simulation and an engaging gaming environment, which embeds participants in situations where they must cooperate as a team to make strategic decisions based on shared information. The game is easy learn, engaging but poses challenge for players in sharing information, and making collective decisions for cooperative action. Wrapped around the games are protocols of use, tailorable to the needs of the client, preparing participants for play and incorporating reflective learning in a non-threatening environment. The benefits to participants are great awareness of the need to cooperation within teams and of the skills needed for this. They achieve a greater appreciation of their own strengths and weaknesses in these skills as well as appreciating the different skills and perceptions of others. Managers receive a report from the program containing an evaluation of the levels of skills of participants, potential roles for which they are suited and suggestions for further training in team skills. The benefit to the organisation from the program :is the raising of social capital, leading to a happier workforce, more productive and innovative workforce.

**References on the Go*Team Game **
Hasan, H., Warne, L., and Mitchard, H. (2007). Lessons from Go*Team Simulations on Shared Situation Awareness. Best Paper Award, Proceedings of the SimTect Conference, Brisbane 4-7 June, 2007. [] Hasan, H., Warne, L., and Crawford, K. (2007). Emergent cooperative activity in distributed team performance in Go*Team, Proceedings of SimTect 2007 Conference, Brisbane, June 4-7 2007 .[]  Hasan, H., and Warne, L. (2008) //Go*Team experimentation results: research, train and sustain. Human Dimensions of NCW// sub-task report. DSTO-RR-0337. [] Warne, L. H. Hasan, D. Hart (2006) “Go* Team: a new approach to developing a knowledge sharing culture” in the //Proceedings of the 17th Australasian Conference on Information Systems//, Adelaide, 6-8 December, 2006, Adelaide, CD-ROM. []  Hasan, H., and Warne, L. (2008) //Go*Team experimentation results: research, train and sustain. Human Dimensions of NCW// sub-task report. Joint Operations Division DSTO-RR-0337. [|http://hdl.handle.net/1947/9860]