Gaming has become a huge part of our lives. Everyone has at least a couple of video games that they have downloaded on to their smartphones. If you are on social media websites like Facebook, you are encouraged by games to compete against your friends. So when the researchers at the Brigham Young University decided to checkout how gaming affected office productivity, it was time for coworkers to play video games together.

Researchers got people to play a geocaching game. The study had 352 participants spread over 80 teams. No member of the team would have any connection to another member before this exercise. Before being sent out to geocache after the first time they were randomly asked to either play video games together, or have some quiet time, or have a goal training discussion to improve the geocaching results.

The results of the study that was published in AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, found that the team that played Video Games saw a 20% increase in productivity in the subsequent tasks that they were asked to carry out. Now that’s a call to action to take your colleagues out to a gaming arcade to bond better and perform better in office. It’s all there in the report of this science project!