Toward an effective approach to collaboration education: A taxonomy for game design

Collaborative video games provide a challenge to designers, who must account for not only the thoughts and actions of individuals, but also the events and interactions among players. However, such games are also an important potential tool for teaching and promoting collaboration, a concept crucial to academia, industry, and education. Before we can develop the necessary design principles to guide game design or the assessment tools to determine the impact of collaborative video games, we must first understand the concept of collaboration. Unfortunately, collaboration is ambiguous, and contradictory definitions exist throughout literature. To reconcile the research space and develop a concrete understanding of collaboration, we analyzed over 25 existing studies and surveys from a wide range of disciplines and with diverse target demographics. The resulting multilevel taxonomy has four main components: group quality, coordination, communication, and support, which in turn are split into subcomponents. Our taxonomy can be used by researchers to inform study design, by game creators to develop design principles, and by educators to guide collaboration assessment.