Playing with leadership and expertise

Ad-hoc virtual teams often lack tools to formalize leadership and structure collaboration, yet they are often successful. How does this happen? We argue that the emergence of leadership and the development of expertise occurs in the process of taking action and in direct response to a lack of structure. Using a twinned set of eight modality sliders, we examine the interactions of fourteen players in an alternate reality game. We find that players adopted military language and culture to structure and arrange their play. We determine that it is critical to account for the context of play across these modalities in order to design appropriately for effective in-game virtual organizing.