How can video game experiences strengthen collaborative intelligence within the company?

« We only know the things we tame » the fox told the Little Prince, and Albert Einstein added « Knowledge is acquired through experience all the time. rest is just information »

What if the essence of collaborative intelligence was only a mouse, keyboard, pad or joystick away?

Faced with the apparent ingenuity of this questioning and even though gamification, or gamification for English speakers, is on the rise within the company, it will be less a question here of being interested in the transposition of game mechanism in a work or learning situation, but more to focus on the virtues of the subjective experience in itself.

This heuristic methodology will allow [companies/ collaborators/ organizations/ Teams] to investigate a phenomenon [The Flow/ Team Flow] in which they will be immersed via an intense experience of the studied phenomenon [The cooperative video game experience].

The objective is to experience and transpose new dynamics of collaboration, to unite the team around an ultimate experience, to release personal and professional potential and to maximize the feeling of belonging.

If we change our way of perceiving collaboration, we change our way of feeling it and we therefore change our way of acting.

Video games naturally provide an environment that facilitates the emergence of the state of flow.

The concept of flow is taken very seriously in Game design and the process of creating a video game, in particular to create an immersive and captivating experience, but also by presenting a constant challenge and progressive adapting and modulating the difficulty according to the skills and interests of each player.

Also called “Optimal Experience”, flow is an inherently rewarding mental state, in which those who are strongly engaged in an activity for its own sake find themselves in a state of maximum concentration.

Attentional absorption is total and all cognitive energy is dedicated to carrying out the activity.

For almost twenty years, the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied

What human beings thought and felt, in the different activities of their existence. Through this, he developed a phenomenology of experiences, and of the conditions characterizing the moments that people described, among the best of their lives.

The phenomenology of the optimal experience is the product of the following eight conditions and characteristics:

• The task undertaken is achievable but challenging and requires special skill. The demands of the action match the abilities of the actor.

• The individual concentrates on what he is doing. Distractions are reduced to a minimum, the person can concentrate exclusively on what they are doing.

• The intended target is clear. Clear goals lead to action. The person knows exactly what to do moment by moment.

• The current activity provides immediate feedback. Immediate feedback follows the action, the person knows exactly where they are.

• Autotelic experience: the individual’s commitment is deep and makes all distraction disappear.

• The person exercises control over their actions within the parameters of the activity without necessarily controlling the results.

• Preoccupation with the self disappears, the actor is able to forget his own person (his ego) but paradoxically, the sense of self is reinforced as a result of the optimal experience.

• The altered perception of time.

These aspects can be present independently of each other.are others, but only the combination of several of them, makes it possible to constitute a true experience of Flow.

The flow experience directs people’s attention to the positive in every situation. This « positive focus » therefore makes it possible not to remain focused on negative elements (such as anxiety for example) and therefore, for individuals, to focus on the elements that would allow them to succeed. a performance.

Build up your autotelism! Performing games, fulfilling games, collaborating games

Team Flow: The optimal Co-op experience.

We owe the conceptual development of team flow to, Cocorico, a French psychologist, : Joceran Borderie, who in his thesis « the quest for team flow in cooperative video games: conceptual and methodological contributions</em >” particularly focuses his research on team flow and its phenomenology.

Using Csikszentmihalyi’s terminology, he describes team flow as a state of « collective negentropy »: « Where on an individual scale, the order (absence of entropy) reigning in consciousness allows the achievement of exceptional performance, on a collective scale, “cooperative negentropy” generates a harmonization of consciousness and actions leading the team to perfect interactions and a fusion of egos. »

Borderie was able to identify in this study two dimensions specific to the state of team flow:

* Operational Harmony

One characteristic of the state of team flow reported by players is the perception they have that the actions of the different members of the team are taking place in perfect harmony. This dimension relating to cooperation is specific to team flow and is obviously not found in the definition of individual flow. This sense of osmosis and fluidity emerging from well-timed team member input has been described by players as being either the result of sequential contribution or synchronicity of each of them.

* the feeling of merging

A specific characteristic of team flow described by the players concerns the feeling they have, when they experience intense moments of optimal cooperation, of belonging to a common, global entity, which transcends the sum of the individuals. In other words, during powerful episodes of team flow; for its members, the team is no longer the juxtaposition of isolated individuals interacting, but a whole that takes shape beyond each one.

Borderie also highlighted the role of certain psychosocial processes in the functioning of team flow.

First positive interdependence, which « establishes structural and functional links between players, thus creating conditions conducive to the emergence of the state of optimal experience . »

When players share the same goals, and they interact< /span> At the heart of the action emerges cooperation and the possibility that it be sublimated and experienced as a collective state of grace.</p >

More precisely, these are action interdependence (the need for one player to perform an action so that another can perform one themselves) and temporal interdependence (action interdependence constrained by time) that seem to have the most significant impacts on team flow.

This interdependence creates strong functional links between team members, and requires them to cooperate in achieving their goals.

A second factor seems to play a determining role in the appearance of team flow is that of mental modelsshared. Seen here as the mental representation, organized and shared by the members of a team, relating to information concerning the key elements of its environment

As players report, team flow is experienced when everyone knows what they have to do, and does it exactly when they have to do it.

« The best indicator of team development is the percentage of ‘we’ divided by the ‘I’s’ you hear in conversations » – Peter Drucker

The heuristic virtues of the video game experience of corporate collaboration

A team, collaborators who, in an environment devoid of any professional affect, fully immerse themselves in an optimal experience that generates new dynamics of collaboration will be able to nurturing and transposing them into the professional environment, increasing their sense of collective and personal effectiveness, maximizing their sense of belonging, and their commitment to strong cohesion.

And by cause and effect, strengthen collaborative intelligence within the company.