Emergent cooperative activity in distributed team performance in Go*Team

The need to cooperate in self-directed, distributed teams is fundamental to the concepts of Network Centric Warfare (NCW), where collective activity comprises communication and shared understanding, leading to innovative decisions and actions. While technical components have an important role in enabling a NCW configuration, the organisational and behavioural components generate value. Go*Team, a computerised client-server team version of the ancient Chinese strategy game of Go, is designed to help researchers understand this phenomenon and then to be a means of training individuals and teams for cooperative activities. The goal of Go*Team is the development of a micro-world simulation of a NCW environment so that there are a range of differences between Go*Team and standard Go that are driven by the need to incorporate the necessary NCW characteristics. These modifications introduce the imperative for information sharing and integration into the game. In this paper the conduct and outcomes of Go*Team live tests, data collection and analysis, to date, are discussed in terms of emergent findings on co-operative behaviours under different conditions of the Go*Team environment.