TeamUp

The further development of TeamUp, a teamwork focused serious game

Introduction
At the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management a first concept of a serious game had been developed to assist in teamwork training. The goal of this graduation project was to take this concept and develop it into a full featured prototype that can be used to test all intended aspects. The goal of this concept game was to facilitate assessment and training of teamwork through a serious game, however a lot of refinement and expansion on the original concept was required to develop it further.

The reasoning for using a serious game in this context is, that currently most training tools that assess users do this based on limited input from the users and/or observation. The advantage of game technology in this context is that it could allow far more fine grained statistics to be recorded during a training session. In addition, shorter feedback loops can be used to encourage different behaviour in users which could lead to a faster learning experience for the end user.
The game was designed to allow for easy use in a way that inexperienced users do not need to spend a significant amount of time just trying to understand how to play the game, nor should they have a serious disadvantage while playing the game with others with more experience in this field.

Process
As the project was a continuation of previous work the previous version of the game was first studied to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the previous prototype’s implementation.
In addition the needs of the various stakeholders were analyzed to gain a better understanding of the requirements of the final product. Based on this analysis a new design directions was formulated.
Various specific parts of the game, such as the challenges the players would be faced with and the user interfaces used in the game, were studied and concepts were generated to design a new prototype that would these requirements.
Finally a new prototype was developed to evaluate this new design direction. To ensure that the game worked will for its intended audience an iterative approach to the development of this new prototype was chosen with extensive user tests to create short feedback loops.

Results
A completely redesigned and rebuild prototype of the game was delivered. The new version is more than twice as long and provides a more comprehensive and consistent experience.
The game also features logging capabilities that are designed to work together with a research and facilitation tooling currently under development at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management.
When this tooling is completed it will allow workshop facilitators who use the game to gain detailed insights in each individual player’s as well as their team’s actions. In addition the extensive datasets from each play session can form the basis of further research in teamwork in general.

Arne Bezuijen
teamupgame.com

Badke-Schaub, P.G. , Aprile, W.A., Mayer, I.S.
master thesis, July 2012