Who Dunnit: The Party Mystery Game for Analyzing Network Structure and Information Flow

The activity facilitates students’ understanding of network measures, including different types of node centrality, shortest paths, cliques, and communities, and their implications for information flow in groups or organizations. The goal of the game is for students (a minimum of 10 and maximum of 28 participants in a network; a larger class can be divided into two or more networks) to solve a company mystery by exchanging information clues with other students based on an imposed communication network configuration. The activity can be debriefed by discussing the game outcomes, analyzing the network structure (using a software to input data and calculate key network measures), and evaluating the practicality of the game. Examples of network configuration, data sets, and a script which uses the igraph package in R are included.