Less is More: : Analysing Communication in Teams of Strangers

Teamwork is challenging in cooperative digital games, especially between strangers. In many online cooperative games, teams have a short-lived existence and ever-changing membership. Our study explores how short-lived, ad hoc teams of strangers communicate and investigate its effect on team performance. We use the commercial cooperative digital game, Portal 2 and analyse 2256 text message instances produced by teams during a 45-minute interaction. Our findings show that team communication is negatively related to performance, and affects performance over and beyond prior experience. A content analysis shows that teams generally have higher task-related communication than socio-emotional communication. This pattern is consistent throughout the duration of the interaction period. The results are discussed in the context of previous research on team communication and performance, and we draw parallels with communication patterns in real-world groups such as aviation crews.