There’s a game for the Oculus Quest (that you can also buy on Steam) called “Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes”.
It’s a two-player game. When playing with the VR headset, one of you wears the headset and has to defuse bombs in a limited amount of time (either 3, 4 or 5 mins), while the other person sits outside the headset with the bomb-defusal manual and tells you what to do. Whereas with other collaboration games, you’re all looking at the screen together, with this game the substrate of communication is solely conversation, the other person is providing all of your inputs about how their half is going (i.e. not shown on a screen).
The types of puzzles are fairly straightforward computational problems but with lots of fiddly instructions, and require the outer person to figure out what information they need from the inner person. It often involves things like counting numbers of wires of a certain colour, or remembering the previous digits that were being shown, or quickly describing symbols that are not any known letter or shape.
So the game trains you and a partner in efficiently building a shared language for dealing with new problems.
More than that, as the game gets harder, often some of the puzzles require substantial independent computation from the player on the outside. At this point, it can make sense to play with more than two people, and start practising methods for assigning computational work between the outer people (e.g. one of them works on defusing the first part of the bomb, and while they’re computing in their head for ~40 seconds, the other works on defusing the second part of the bomb in dialogue with the person on the inside). This further creates a system which trains the ability to efficiently coordinate on informational work under.
Overall I think it’s a pretty great game for learning and practising a number of high-pressure communication skills with people you’re close to.
I use both this game and Space Team as part of training people in the on-call rotation at my company. They generally report that it’s fun, and I love it because it usually creates the kind of high-pressure feelings in people they may experience when on-call, so it creates a nice, safe environment for them to become more familiar with those feelings and how to work through them.
On a related note, I’m generally interested in finding more cooperative games with asymmetric information and a need to communicate. Lots of games meet one or two of those criteria, but very few games are able to meet all simultaneously. For example, Hanabi is cooperative and asymmetric, but lacks much communication (you’re not allowed to talk), and many games are asymmetric and communicative but not cooperative (Werewolf, Secret Hitler, etc.) or cooperative and communicative but not asymmetric (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert, etc.).
There’s a game for the Oculus Quest (that you can also buy on Steam) called “Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes”.
It’s a two-player game. When playing with the VR headset, one of you wears the headset and has to defuse bombs in a limited amount of time (either 3, 4 or 5 mins), while the other person sits outside the headset with the bomb-defusal manual and tells you what to do. Whereas with other collaboration games, you’re all looking at the screen together, with this game the substrate of communication is solely conversation, the other person is providing all of your inputs about how their half is going (i.e. not shown on a screen).
The types of puzzles are fairly straightforward computational problems but with lots of fiddly instructions, and require the outer person to figure out what information they need from the inner person. It often involves things like counting numbers of wires of a certain colour, or remembering the previous digits that were being shown, or quickly describing symbols that are not any known letter or shape.
So the game trains you and a partner in efficiently building a shared language for dealing with new problems.
More than that, as the game gets harder, often some of the puzzles require substantial independent computation from the player on the outside. At this point, it can make sense to play with more than two people, and start practising methods for assigning computational work between the outer people (e.g. one of them works on defusing the first part of the bomb, and while they’re computing in their head for ~40 seconds, the other works on defusing the second part of the bomb in dialogue with the person on the inside). This further creates a system which trains the ability to efficiently coordinate on informational work under.
Overall I think it’s a pretty great game for learning and practising a number of high-pressure communication skills with people you’re close to.
There’s a similar free game for Android and iOs called space team that I highly recommend.
I use both this game and Space Team as part of training people in the on-call rotation at my company. They generally report that it’s fun, and I love it because it usually creates the kind of high-pressure feelings in people they may experience when on-call, so it creates a nice, safe environment for them to become more familiar with those feelings and how to work through them.
On a related note, I’m generally interested in finding more cooperative games with asymmetric information and a need to communicate. Lots of games meet one or two of those criteria, but very few games are able to meet all simultaneously. For example, Hanabi is cooperative and asymmetric, but lacks much communication (you’re not allowed to talk), and many games are asymmetric and communicative but not cooperative (Werewolf, Secret Hitler, etc.) or cooperative and communicative but not asymmetric (Pandemic, Forbidden Desert, etc.).
+1 – this game is great.
It’s really good with 3-4 people giving instructions and one person in the hot seat. Great for team bonding.