For two days in 2004, soldiers from the 29th Infantry Division were on the watch for flying goblins. To defend themselves, they had to rely on the spells of their wizards and the vigilance of their archers.

Rather than being part of a secretive attack on Hogwarts, these soldiers were taking part in military training exercise known as “Gorman’s Gambit.” General Paul Gorman was once the head of Southern Command, the army headquarters in charge of Latin America. He had spent a lot of time thinking about how to improve teamwork in the military, and he came to believe that team skills could be taught in basically any environment.

Specifically, General Gorman bet that storming a castle in a video game would be effective in teaching the kind of teamwork needed by soldiers during real assaults on fortified positions. This argument was put to the test via Neverwinter Nights.

Virtual Playing Field

With the assistance of research company BBN, the Army modified Neverwinter Nights and designed a virtual playing field featuring two castles, each occupied by different platoons. The castles were connected by a cavern filled with devious traps, as well as a longer, safer path that wound through the landscape.

Each platoon’s goal was to take over the other platoon’s castle, or alternatively, a number of control points scattered around the map. Each member of a platoon was assigned a fantasy version of a real Army role. The medic became a cleric, with powerful spells that allowed him to resurrect the dead but with only a knife to defend himself. Artillery support was provided by wizards, capable of hurling powerful spells long distance, while the boots on the ground carried swords and chainmail instead of machine guns.

At first glance, the premise behind Gorman’s Gambit seems fairly fantastic in itself. There is a wide gap between the deserts of Iraq and the elf-filled lands of Neverwinter Nights. But there is also a long tradition of using fairly abstract games to encourage teamwork and communication. Rope courses, paintball tournaments, and rafting trips have all been used to break the ice between teammates and encourage collaboration outside of the corporate setting. So why not use video games set in a fantasy world?    

Team Communication

Neverwinter Nights ultimately proved to be an effective training environment. The researchers running Gorman’s Gambit discovered that all of the key traits of team communication – monitoring, leadership, adaptability, and many others – were demonstrated in the game.

Soldiers gradually improved these skills as the game progressed, despite the fantasy context of the game. Interestingly, most soldiers didn’t even realize that they were learning anything from the experience. After the exercise, they insisted that they had not improved their teamwork skills, despite all indication to the contrary.

Gorman’s Gambit used a rather free-form approach to teaching teamwork – giving players a wide remit and allowing them to learn from each other in the process of achieving their goals. There is another game-based approach, and that is to focus on very specific team problems that are usually hard to identify and correct. One such problem is that teams often prove dumber than their individual members. This is caused by a phenomenon known as “process loss” – the opposite of the “wisdom of crowds.” 

Process Loss

Process loss happens when teams fail to share information, get trapped by various conflicting goals, lose themselves in unproductive argument, and fall into a pattern of groupthink. A game called Everest, which was designed by Harvard Business School Publishing and Forio Business Simulations, forces players to grapple with all of these issues and overcome them as a team. 

Everest sends MBA students climbing up its namesake. After watching a harrowing video describing the mountain climbing experience, students are divided into teams of five and assigned roles with individual descriptions and goals, ranging from extreme sports enthusiast to the trip doctor. Over the course of the next hour, teams work their way up the mountain, and are faced with a variety of challenges such as oxygen shortages, terrible weather, and sudden illness. In the end, the only way to win Everest is to work together as a team, share information, and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

As a game, Everest doesn’t use the flashiest graphics or deepest interaction to help people suspend disbelief. Players interact with a stylized map of the mountain through a selection of check boxes. The experience is rounded out with graphs and graphics that allow the team meteorologist to predict the weather and the team doctor to analyze illnesses. The game’s genius is in its core design – it assigns slightly different goals and provides slightly different information to each player. The doctor knows crucial information about various diseases, but cannot act on that information if the marathon runner fails to report that she is feeling ill – a likely occurrence given that the game encourages her to hide the information. Players are encouraged to chat privately with one another using an instant messaging system.

These simple elements combine to create a very immersive and emotional experience – conspiracies form between the meteorologist and the photographer, while the doctor hides the fact that there is only one dose of aspirin remaining. Halfway through the exercise, any observer will be able to tell the differences between teams that are overcoming process loss and teams that have succumbed to it. The functional teams are productively calculating their remaining oxygen supply, while the dysfunctional teams horde information. Needless to say, only the functional teams make it to the summit. The result is powerful lesson to all players, who learn in no uncertain terms what the cost of poor teamwork can be and the ways in which teamwork problems might be overcome.

In any game, players are rewarded for learning the rules of the game and applying those lessons properly. In Everest and Gorman’s Gambit, the rules are designed to encourage teamwork and punish failures to communicate. They are simple and elegant examples of how games can be used to teach the principles of good teamwork.  We discuss several other ways that games are being used for training purposes, and provide tips on how to create and leverage such games effectively, in the rest of Changing the Game.

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Changing The Game

Changing the Game reveals how leading-edge organizations are using video games to reach new customers more cost-effectively; to build brands; to recruit, develop, and retain great employees; to drive more effective experimentation and innovation; and to supercharge productivity. It is written for a general audience, and includes a wide variety of case studies, practical tips, and warnings of pitfalls to avoid when creating or using video games for business purposes.

Reviewed positively in The Economist, Inc. Magazine and The Financial Times, it’s written by David Edery (pictured), Worldwide Games Portfolio Manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade and Ethan Mollick,  studies innovation and entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management. You can order it here.