CinQ’s video game design is your interactive teamwork coach
Learn why virtual simulation game-flow can accelerate empowered teamwork and leadership skills
CinQ’s game design is a coach.
That’s it in a nutshell.
What?
For non-gamers and perhaps even for some gamers, understanding that the underlying principles behind the game they are playing actually includes pedagogical principles.
Let’s drill down a level.
CinQ is a competitive video game. What we mean by competitive is that a team of five players must collaborate and cooperate to solve 40+ challenges broken into 11 chapters.
In every single step of the game, CinQ’s challenges help define your skills gap.
Think about it:
What happens when you can’t solve the challenges?
You sometimes fail repeatedly.
What do you do?
You go back and try again.
You fail again.
You as a team have to rethink your goals, tactics, experimentation, risk taking and problem-solving processes.
You go back again and sort of succeed.
And bit by bit, you realign your activities to actually achieve your goal.
Challenge one down.
That’s a great feeling for the team.
Suddenly, you feel like a team. Not working as a series of individuals. Starting to think as a team, cooperating and sharing information and making decisions to collectively achieve success.
You can’t solve the challenges in the game workflow; well, that helps immediately to define your skills gap. Your team’s capacity to resolve and workout the solution to the barriers in front of you mirror your competencies. The skills gap could be that you are not setting agreed goals. Surprisingly, this is one of the most common faults in the simulation: one of the first stages of empowered teamwork is learning the importance of shared information and getting alignment, when there is a common agreement about what needs to be done, when you are all on the same page. Many participants report that one of their biggest takeaways was making the assumption that everyone knew what that the plan was. They automatically thought that their teammates knew what was to happen next.
Guess what?
They didn’t.
And again and again failure was experienced until they fixed this fault line in their thinking.
So, the games challenges act as the teacher and the coach.
This is quite tough to get your head around some times.
We have designed each challenge as a teamwork self-teaching program. The architecture of the workflow, the environment, and the obstacles are a test of your skills.
And this is important:
The challenges designed in the game are both difficult and at the same time not difficult.
Sorry⁉️
Well, what I mean is that for a team with low-level collaboration skills, it will seem very difficult, and at times painfully so.
Just getting your team to communicate and share what they see is really demanding.
At the very early stages of the simulation, you face a drone; this drone acts as a security guard, patrolling the front of the main target building. Countless participants fail to inform their fellow team members upon seeing the drone: they don’t think it is essential. There is no team empathy. So, again and again, teams fail. They fail until they agree a protocol that each team member shares what they are experiencing, whether they think it is significant or not. Then, bit by bit, they apply this logic to each obstacle they meet.
Over time, the game’s difficulty level decreases.
Not because we as designers have made the challenges easy. But precisely because we haven’t.
Nope; instead, your skills as a team increase.
You clearly set and agree goals; you collaborate, communicate and share information effectively; you learn to operate at speed. Through experimentation and creative thinking, you are able to develop a range of potential solutions to problems you meet.
What the game workflow reveals is your character. It tests and develops real teamwork and leadership skills. Though the game is a virtual environment, the skills developed are real world.
CinQ cannot be mastered in a single sitting, it requires multiple sessions. Changing roles adds another level of challenges as each member has to start to see the collaboration process through each other’s eyes. This helps teams understand the nature of cross-functional and multidisciplinary teams.
Add another layer of fun, engagement, and skill level by getting teams to play against each other. Competing in time challenges and with juries that assess or judge your display of power skills can further embed empowered teamwork skills in your culture.
