Recently I wrote about some new research from the University of Memphis highlighting that collaborative problem solving was a key skill for the 4th industrial revolution.  Video games seem an unlikely place to look for improvements in such working, and yet a recent study by Brigham Young University suggests just that.

The study suggests that newly formed teams can experience a 20% boost to their productivity after they had played a video game together for 45 minutes.  The researchers believe their findings add to a growing body of evidence supporting the value of team-based video games.

“To see that big of a jump—especially for the amount of time they played—was a little shocking,” they say. “Companies are spending thousands and thousands of dollars on team-building activities, and I’m thinking, go buy an Xbox.”

Gaming together

The researchers recruited a few hundred volunteers and split them across 80 teams.  The aim was to ensure that no one on any of the teams had a prior relationship with each other.  Each team was asked to play a geocaching exercise called Findamine, in which they are given text-based clues to help them fine particular landmarks.  Cash prizes were on offer for the winning teams.

After playing Findamine for a short while, the teams were split into one of three conditions.  The first of these saw them playing a team-based video game, the second afforded them time for quite homework, and the third goal training discussion to improve their geocaching.  Those in the video game group were given the option of playing either Rock Band or Halo 4, both of which require team work from the players, but aren’t directly related to the task at hand.

Interestingly, whilst the volunteers who were given goal-specific training thought that their teams performed more cohesively afterwards, it was actually the volunteers in the video gaming groups whose performance levels rose the most.

“Team video gaming may truly be a viable—and perhaps even optimal—alternative for team building,” the researchers explain.

Interestingly, it didn’t seem to matter whether the volunteers were regular gamers or not.  Even when novice gamers participated, they too received the boost in their performance.  Indeed, the novices often saw an even bigger boost to their team working capabilities than their gaming colleagues.

Suffice to say, most work environments won’t be full of strangers but people who already have some kind of working relationship, and the researchers admit that it’s far from clear whether gaming will provide a similar performance boost to people with an existing relationship.  Indeed, they accept that it might even make things worse by reinforcing the biases and negative relationships that have developed offline.

Nonetheless, it’s an interesting body of work and hopefully they will test the hypothesis further to see whether it provides a similar impact on teams with an existing relationship.