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The impact of virtual teamwork on real-world collaboration

Published: 29 October 2009 Publication History

Abstract

With the rapid advance of online gaming and virtual reality technology, virtual teamwork has become increasingly popular. People spend more and more time working with others in 3D virtual environments to accomplish common goals. In this study, we investigate the impact of virtual teamwork on collaboration in the real world. We conducted a study with a sample of 60 participants. These participants were asked to work in groups of three and play a Nintendo Wii music game. Half of the groups were assigned to the control condition where members played the game individually. The other half of the groups were assigned to the experimental condition where members play the game altogether as in a band. After the game play, all groups performed a collaborative problem-solving task and a creativity task. Results show that groups in the experimental condition performed significantly better than the groups in the control condition. This suggests that virtual teamwork has a positive effect on collaborative problem-solving and group creativity in the real world.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ACE '09: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
    October 2009
    456 pages
    ISBN:9781605588643
    DOI:10.1145/1690388
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 29 October 2009

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    Author Tags

    1. collaboration
    2. group creativity
    3. human-computer interaction
    4. problem-solving
    5. social interaction
    6. teamwork
    7. video games
    8. virtual teams

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