Work for or Against Players: On the Use of Collaboration Engineering for Collaborative Games

Collaborative games require players to work together on shared activities to achieve a common goal. These games received widespread interest in the past decade, yet little is known on how to design them successfully, as well as how to evaluate or analyse them. To our knowledge no research has looked into applying existing bodies of knowledge on collaboration to games. In this paper, we seek to achieve a better understanding of collaborative processes designed in the mechanics of collaborative games by considering Collaboration Engineering (CE), a discipline that has studied collaboration for decades. The suitability of CE as a theoretical lens is determined by contrasting CE to game design and by discussing its application to two carefully selected case studies. Our insights make clear in what contexts CE is relevant and what kind of role it can play. We conclude that this depends on whether the game mechanics are working for or against players.