We have been asked by several team building companies about the LocoMatrix treasure hunt, with a view to doing something similar for them. I have given this much thought over the last couple of months and have also done some research on the treasure hunt offerings they currently, um, offer.

The first thing you discover when you start researching is just how many team building companies there are - hundreds, and of course the second thing is that they all offer treasure hunts. Most require that you go out with paper and pencil, possibly a camera and even in some cases a GPS unit. But what Ifind interesting is that there is very little talk of how this “builds” a team. I am inclined to think that by and large these might encourage team bonding, but more likely falls under the “fun-day” heading.

So how can we at LocoMatrix help? Glad you asked me that as I have a few thoughts in that department - the first being that we know where all the players are at any time, and because everyone is linked via the server there can be links to their positions and the game play. This can mean various things:

• we can change the play of the game according to the positions of the players
• we can require some/all of the players be in different positions before the game progresses
• we can require that players in their different positions perform tasks that need to be collated before continuing
• and players can be completely remote to each other - within a town, within a country or anywhere worldwide - leading to teams from an organisation playing against each other

It can also mean that team members with different skills or abilities can be required to participate in different ways. I am particularly interested in how we can combine player qualities (e.g. Myers Briggs types [and maybe even discovering these through play]) into the mix.

In future posts I intend to elaborate on how we might achieve some of these goals