A Multiplayer Team Performance Task: Design and Evaluation

Background

Where the successful accomplishment of an organization’s mission requires the coordinated contributions of two or more individuals collectively identified with the achievement of a common objective, the conditions for a team are operationally defined (Emurian, Brady, Ray, Meyerhoff, & Mougey, 1984). This definition is consistent with Salas, Rosen, Burke, Nicholson, and Howse (2007) who emphasize teams to be units of people having (1) task interdependencies and dynamic social interactions, (2) shared valued goals, (3) a limited lifespan, (4) distributed expertise, (5) and clearly defined participant roles. Eliciting and evaluating teamwork within distributed multiplayer game-based settings have been acknowledged to show great potential for engaging players in immersive and simulated environments in which to observe complex behaviors having direct relevance to the mission of an organization, to include the U.S. military (Hussain, Weil, Brunye, Sidman, Alexander, & Ferguson, 2008) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Emurian, Canfield, Roma, Gasior, Brinson, Hienz, Hursh, & Brady, 2009; Hienz, Brady, Hursh, Gasior, Spence, & Emurian, 2008). Related research documents the applications of online computer games to support collaborative and distributive communications, peer interactions, and resource sharing to achieve learning objectives (Papastergiou, 2008), and guidelines for the development of collaborative educational videogames overlap with several of the five features of a team given above (Zea, Sanchez, Gutierrez, Cabrera, & Paderewski, 2009). Finally, Mayo (2009) noted that an attractive dimension of game-based assessment is its potential to track sequences of user actions and communications that can be mapped onto higher-order skills and abilities.