Sprottenborn: Ein online mediiertes Rollenspiel

In politics and business, the new communications media are being used increasingly for the purpose of staging discursive conflicts. Program systems have been developed, which are designed to facilitate decision making in moderated or mediated groups. One of these programs, “ZENO”, was tested in a three-month online roll-playing encounter called “Sprottenborn”. The use of role playing in a research context is methodologically new. The communication experiences and the written interactions among participating subjects were analyzed. The main purpose of our investigations was to make a contribution to further development of the software and to gain a more insightful view of typical online psychosocial processes. We compared them with well known results of sociopsychological discourse research.. This project was carried out jointly by the Institute for Autonomous Intelligence Systems (AiS) in St. Augustin, Germany and the Working Group on Online Mediation at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) in Berlin, Germany.