Designing the future of collaborative workplace systems

Roles People Play

“…Player collaboration is a primary design goal for ARG designers, who strive "to create puzzles and challenges that no single person could solve on their own" [46:203]. Indeed, players in ARGs often successfully navigate the same problems that workers in knowledge organizations 1 face, such as making sense of disparate data distributed across multiple media, or defining and coordinating problem-solving tasks [15,25,39,46]. Players in the ARG, I Love Bees (ILB) organized themselves into different subgroups, each representing competing theories about story data they had collected, in order to determine the best interpretation and collective plan of action [46,57].…”

“…Players in the ARG, I Love Bees (ILB) organized themselves into different subgroups, each representing competing theories about story data they had collected, in order to determine the best interpretation and collective plan of action [46,57]. Because of the success with which players collectively operate in many ARGs, they also offer insight into potential designs for collaborative methods and tools that support knowledge organizations and learning communities [8,25,39,58]. By "learning communities," we refer to diverse social groups that emphasize social interaction, active and situated learning [19,71]), and can be formal (e.g., in a school, classroom, or professional organization), or informal (e.g., an after-school club, social media network) [42].…”

“…Consequently, investigating the social roles that ARG creators integrate into their designs to promote and sustain participation can inform the design and implementation of future ARGs and similar transmedia experiences, especially in learning contexts [8,25,46,57]. Categorizing these social roles can also enhance our understanding of the ways in which problem-solving communities self-organize and offer options for designers to explicitly engineer mechanisms for more productive roles into future designs [25,47,57].…”

“…Consequently, investigating the social roles that ARG creators integrate into their designs to promote and sustain participation can inform the design and implementation of future ARGs and similar transmedia experiences, especially in learning contexts [8,25,46,57]. Categorizing these social roles can also enhance our understanding of the ways in which problem-solving communities self-organize and offer options for designers to explicitly engineer mechanisms for more productive roles into future designs [25,47,57]. While previous, focused studies of specific ARGs have laid the groundwork for such categorizations [15,25,31,45,57], the research presented in this paper aims to extend these individual accounts by developing a broader framework of social roles that support participation in ARGs overall.…”

“…Categorizing these social roles can also enhance our understanding of the ways in which problem-solving communities self-organize and offer options for designers to explicitly engineer mechanisms for more productive roles into future designs [25,47,57]. While previous, focused studies of specific ARGs have laid the groundwork for such categorizations [15,25,31,45,57], the research presented in this paper aims to extend these individual accounts by developing a broader framework of social roles that support participation in ARGs overall. This paper makes the following contributions to gamesbased research and social computing design.…”