COLLABORATIVE DECISION PROCESS GAME 1 Collaborative Decision Process Game

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a small group decision-making game, the Argue and Decide Game (A&D-Game). The A&D-Game was designed to guide the social process of a meeting, to avoid or detect fallicious arguments and to visualize the argumentation flow. A questionnaire to evaluate the game was filled in by five participants and one meeting facilitator of a decision-making meeting that had used the game. The evaluation results provide insight in the opportunities of games like the A&D-game to support small group decision making processes. According to the participants the game helped to control the focus the discussion, it provided an overview of the discussed topics, it increased and balanced the participation level, it increased the understanding of each other‟s perspective, it triggered “out of the box” arguments, it prevented polarization, and it helped the participants to avoid and detect fallacious arguments. COLLABORATIVE DECISION PROCESS GAME 3 How to make a decision between solutions that have far reaching consequences for very diverse groups of people with very diverse interests, visions and knowledge? How to reach a decision when the knowledge and experience needed to decide can never be in one single mind? Collaborative decision-making is a possible, if not the correct, answer to these questions. Unfortunately, there are several problems that arise when groups try to decide together during meetings. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a game designed to support small group decisionmaking meetings. The game has six main objectives: 1) reducing drawbacks of group meetings, 2) reducing negative behavior of participants, 3) support a positive social-emotional atmosphere, 4) help participants to avoid or detect fallicious arguments, 5) increasing understanding of each others perspective and emotions during a discussion, and 6) structure the meeting content visually during the meeting. The outline of the paper is as follows. The next paragraph provides some background about drawbacks of meetings, undesirable participant behavior, the importance of the support of social-emotional process during a meeting, and fallicious arguments. The use of games to support meetings is not new, but the effect of these games has not yet been subject for empirical research. Therefore we focus on the argument visualization element of the game in the paragraph “related work”. Argumentation diagrams and other meeting support tools that were used as source of inspiration for the argument visualization method of the A&D-game are described. This paragraph also discuses the effect of argument visualization during meetings. In paragraph “Argue & Decide Game Design” we portray the A&D-Game design. We describe the game elements and the expected effects of these elements. The subsequent paragraphs describe how we evaluated the game, the results of this evaluation, and the discussion of the results. Finally, we conclude this paper with ideas for future research. This study has an explorative nature. We explore the possibility of a content independed game to support multi-stakeholder decision-making meetings. COLLABORATIVE DECISION PROCESS GAME 4 Background Although meetings are needed when people have to decide together, there are some drawbacks of meetings that decrease the efficiency and effectivity of meetings. Moreover, undesirable behavior of individuals the participate to a meeting often reduces the productivity of a meeting. Apart from productivity is the social-emotional outcome of a meeting also very important. This paragraph discusses these topics in more detail.