Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created an innovative way to practice working together and achieving a common goal. In Monsters of Appalachia(opens in new window), players learn how to build better movements through live action role play.
The Center for Transformational Play(opens in new window) (CTP) at CMU created the game for Remake Learning(opens in new window), a Pittsburgh-based education network that offers free support and collaborative opportunities for educators across the region. The idea is to help people, such as community organizers and activists, find common ground, build strong local movements and successfully do their work.
“There are challenges that come up in group collaboration — think of a coworker who insists that things have to be perfect and are unwilling to accept a partial solution, even if it could help reach a better future,” said Jessica Hammer(opens in new window), director of the CTP and an associate professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute (opens in new window)and the Entertainment Technology Center(opens in new window).
“That’s even more difficult when you’re talking about people who come from different organizational contexts,” said Hammer, who led the integration of research and design for the game. “We identified several places where games could help bridge divides. One of the big ones was helping people reflect on ways that collaborations can go wrong and develop strategies to strengthen them before the problem comes up.”
In the game, players take on the characters of Appalachian cryptids, mythical creatures like bigfoot or the Flatwoods Monster.
A strong sense of place is central to its design, said Kaitlin Heller(opens in new window), senior development specialist, who co-designed the game with the CTP’s lead game designer Elaine Fath(opens in new window).
“Pittsburgh has not just a strong local identity, but also a strong sense of mutual aid,” she said. “I think that that’s part of why the game works. People connect with that type of local identity, local mutual aid, and it helps them collaborate.”
The science of learning to work together
Monsters of Appalachia draws from role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, where players guide their characters through a series of challenges. As a live-action game, players explore the physical space and act out the story; a game master (GM) facilitates and answers questions.
“The GM’s job is to be something between a waiter and a stage manager,” said Heller. “They’re there to make sure that everybody has everything that they need to have a good time and to play the game. They also have to represent what in a computer game would be represented by a computer. You go to the GM and ask, ‘did I succeed at this?’ And the GM says ‘yes, you succeeded. Here’s your gold star.’”
Up to 25 players can participate. When each player receives their assigned cryptid persona, they’re also given a card with a list of their monster’s character traits and priorities. For example, Mothpeople are worried about light pollution and want to preserve dark skies. Bigfoots are concerned about construction in natural areas. While keeping these individual issues in mind, the different cryptids must also solve a larger quest the GM throws at the group.
“The challenges are mostly about fixing things that humans have done to change the natural world. Like: Humans have gotten rid of all flowers, you need to find some pollinators,” Heller said. “Other challenges are a little more serious, like if you are trying to get the cryptids to be able to go around on human roads without being noticed.”
Why the game works
The success of groups navigating disagreements in workplaces, communities and classrooms hinges on team dynamics, Hammer said. The game offers an effective way for players to learn to reach bigger goals without feeling like their own priorities are overlooked.
“We asked: How do we get people to reflect on some of the negative behaviors that can come up when you’re doing these kinds of collaborations across institutions, in a way that isn’t going to make them want to avoid cross-institutional collaboration,” she said.
Games are well-suited to facilitate learning because they offer players the chance to practice their skills in a low-stakes environment and then help them translate their experience from play to reality.
“After the game, people are naturally inclined to talk about how it went and what they learned,” Hammer said. “There’s a broad body of evidence that reflective debriefs are effective to help people apply their knowledge in a new context.”
Heller and Hammer believe the reception they’ve gotten so far from players of Monsters of Appalachia is early evidence that it works.
“It definitely succeeded at getting people to help each other, getting people to change how they saw each other,” Heller said. “One high schooler was like, ‘This is helping me understand other people’s perspectives, and I think I could play this with my friends.’”
How healthy teams talk to each other
The skills players practice in Monsters of Appalachia can be applied far beyond the game itself.
CMU researcher and professor Anita Williams Woolley(opens in new window) studies organizational behavior at the Tepper School of Business. She said that the way teams learn together is critical.
“You can have all these experts, but if they don’t coordinate and work well together, it doesn’t matter,” said Woolley. “Their expertise won’t translate into a successful group outcome.”
Once a group is formed, Woolley has found that there are certain behaviors that indicate the team is learning to work well together. One of the patterns Woolley has studied that signals strong team coordination is “burstiness” — clusters of responsive exchanges where teammates exchange information and build on each other’s ideas quickly.
“People are adjusting how and when they work to how their teammates work,” she said. “Burstiness often fosters high engagement, an essential component of successful teamwork.”
Woolley’s research shows that while it’s important to respect and value other members’ contributions, a well-functioning team doesn’t depend on members becoming friends or sharing the same social or political beliefs.
“We’ve seen in our research that you don’t necessarily need to be best buddies with your teammates. The most important thing is that everyone is committed to a shared goal,” she said. “They see the resources that others bring, and so they value the other people and their contributions. Teammates can highly value each other’s contributions to their work together but have no interest whatsoever in hanging out with each other outside of work, maybe because of differences in age, lifestyle or other social factors. Conversely, team members can be great friends, but be very weak as a team, often because members don’t want to challenge each other’s ideas or decisions in ways that might jeopardize the friendship.”
Being able to work well together — regardless of differences — is an idea foundational to Monsters of Appalachia and the game’s designers. And it’s a skill that Woolley believes is increasingly important as more teams collaborate across hybrid or remote work environments. By giving people a low-stakes way to practice those skills, Hammer and Heller hope games like Monsters of Appalachia can help people work together when it matters most.
“One kind of transformation that you can achieve in games is you can feel connected to somebody that you didn’t previously feel like you have something in common with,” Hammer said. “That can have powerful ripple effects.”
Since they first launched the game, the CMU team has made tweaks to improve player experience — like shortening how long it takes to play. After wrapping up a few more logistical issues, they hope to make the game available to community groups, educators and workplaces.
“Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The institution was originally established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical School. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees.”
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