A Genuine ‘Miteinander’: On Becoming a Team in an International Virtual Simulation Game

Abstract

Megacities is a simulation game which uses the Internet as a transnational virtual space for developing intercultural competence, thereby fostering intercultural dialogue. The experience of over a hundred people of several nationalities in this simulation game is at the core of this study, which aims to understand how individuals succeed in creating a genuine ‘Miteinander’ despite language barriers, the constraints of virtual communication, and expected cultural differences. ‘Miteinander’ is a German word which combines the concept of collaboration with that of cohesion. The introduction of this term allows us to further clarify the focus of this investigation, which aims to observe how a diverse group becomes a team in an online environment. This study is a qualitative one and its corpus is composed of reflection sheets in which participants share the feelings, thoughts and perceptions they had before, during, and after their experience in the game Megacities. The analysis of the data revealed that participants had similar fears and perceptions, despite their diversity. Out of their reflections, an interplay of factors related to individual, social, and technical-organizational dimensions emerges. Two factors which have a particularly high impact on the process of building trust and creating culture are looked at in depth in this paper: language and the virtual setting of communication.