Trusted Teammates: Commercial Digital Games Can Be Effective Trust-Building Tools

This study evaluates the effectiveness of commercial digital games as tools for building trust within virtual work teams, contrasting them with traditional social icebreakers. The research posits that games requiring shared, interdependent goals and active coordination provide a superior context for verifying "swift trust"—the initial trust necessary for high-functioning virtual teams—compared to the personal information exchange typical of social icebreakers.

The methodology involved a between-subjects experiment with 80 participants organized into 20 four-person teams. Teams were randomly assigned to either play the commercial mobile game Spaceteam or participate in a standard social icebreaker activity. Researchers measured trust through both attitudinal surveys and a behavioral task, specifically an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game known as Daytrader, which served as a proxy for cooperative behavior. The study also assessed whether an individual’s dispositional trust moderated the effectiveness of the intervention.

The findings indicate that teams using Spaceteam demonstrated significantly higher levels of cooperative behavior in the Daytrader task compared to those using the social icebreaker. However, the study found no significant difference between the two conditions regarding the participants' self-reported perception of team trust, nor did it find that dispositional trust moderated the outcomes. These results suggest that while digital games may not immediately alter subjective feelings of trust, they effectively facilitate the behavioral verification of trust through structured, interdependent gameplay.

Ultimately, the research concludes that commercial digital games are viable, robust tools for virtual team-building that function independently of individual personality differences. By providing a "strong situation" that necessitates cooperation, these games allow team members to test and establish trust in a low-risk, simulated environment, offering a practical alternative to traditional social activities for distributed workforces.