UC Berkeley School of Information

Have you ever watched someone deeply engaged in a video game and performing a highly complex but completely artificial task with incredible competence? Could that focus and attention be bottled and used for something serious? We're convinced it can. In the world of collaboration taking place in the online role-playing games, every day (and night) tens of thousands of teams of 5 to 100's of people from multiple time zones, countries and cultures, each with different and highly complementary skills self-assemble around extremely challenging goals. This sounds a lot like the new world of global business collaboration. The psychological principles and affordances found in MMOs have much to teach us about teamwork, leadership, innovation, urgency, and incentives. To be clear, we are not talking about just using games for training and simulation, although these are wonderful applications. We expect a range of uses that range from borrowing a few of the key psychological ingredients from great games like World of W