Play: The Magic Bullet for Building Trust

(And Why It’s So Dangerous)

In March 2024, a bombshell Government Accountability Office report revealed something most gamers never considered: the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have been quietly coordinating with major gaming companies to monitor players for signs of extremism. (Source: The Intercept)

Five gaming platforms, including Roblox, Discord, and several others that requested anonymity, admitted to sharing user data with federal agencies, flagging content, and implementing moderation systems specifically designed to identify potential radicalization.

The revelation sent shockwaves through gaming communities. Not because players necessarily opposed fighting extremism, but because it highlighted something far more profound: the government now recognizes what psychologists and game designers have understood for decades: games aren’t just entertainment. They’re powerful social environments that forge deep bonds between players with unmatched speed and intensity.

Ever wonder why your first weekend playing pickup basketball with strangers builds more team cohesion than a month of weekly staff meetings? Or why kids who’ve been playing together for 30 minutes act like lifelong friends?

The answer lies in a psychological hack so powerful that it’s simultaneously the fastest tool for legitimate team building and a primary vector for extremist recruitment.

That hack is play.

Why Play Creates Trust at Warp Speed

Play works as a trust accelerator because of three powerful mechanisms that happen simultaneously:

First, play is coded in our brains as fundamentally benign. When someone invites us to play, we instinctively lower our guards because play signals “this is a safe space.” It’s our ancient evolutionary wiring at work. Research from Google’s team development initiatives found that play activities helped team members recognize shared needs and experiences, immediately increasing psychological safety in work environments.

Second, play creates rapid opportunities to demonstrate competence and reliability. In just 20 minutes of a team game, I can show you I’m dependable (I’ve got your back), competent (I can solve problems), and trustworthy (I follow the rules we agreed on). Research from the University of Saskatchewan confirmed that social games are dramatically more effective than traditional icebreakers at building trust precisely because they create contexts of risk and interdependence where actions speak louder than words.

Third, play generates intense shared experiences that serve as powerful bonding agents. The joy of victory, the strategy sessions, even the disappointment of loss… these emotional peaks create memories that cement relationships faster than weeks of casual interaction. Google’s Project Aristotle demonstrated that trust is “even more important than competence when building high-performing teams,” and play activities accelerate trust formation through these emotional connections.

What Game Designers Know That You Don’t

Game designers have understood this dynamic for decades. Why do you think multiplayer games create such loyal communities? The bonds formed between players who overcome challenges together are remarkably durable, even when the players don’t share a geographic location, background, or demographic.

Consider the typical multiplayer team game. Players must:

• Coordinate under pressure
• Demonstrate specific skills
• Communicate effectively
• Trust that teammates will fulfill their roles
• Share both victories and defeats

These conditions mirror exactly what teamwork researchers have identified as the core elements of trust formation in high-performing teams. It’s no accident that tech giants like Microsoft and Google have integrated game-based team building into their onboarding and team development practices, with measurable results in cohesion and psychological safety.

The professional team-building space has caught on too. Traditional ice-breakers like “share three facts about yourself” are being replaced by collaborative problem-solving activities that simulate gameplay. The reason is simple: the research shows play works better, faster.

Trust Through Play: Why It Works

If we drill into the psychology, several factors explain play’s effectiveness at building trust:

Low-stakes failure: Play creates environments where failure is expected and normalized. The belief that you won’t be punished for mistakes is critical for psychological safety, full stop. Team-building experts know that games that embrace failure help build trust by “emphasizing learning over achieving, and framing failure as an accepted and integral element of the team experience.”

Authentic demonstration: In traditional team building, we talk about our skills and values. In play, we demonstrate them through actions. This provides genuine, observable data about another person’s behavior under pressure or in collaborative contexts.

Accelerated feedback loops: Play compresses time, creating multiple opportunities to see how others react to various situations in a short period. This provides a richer dataset about others’ behavior than typical workplace interactions that might take weeks to reveal the same insights.

State changes: Play alters our neurochemistry, elevating dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin levels. These “feel good” chemicals are also associated with bonding and trust formation. The biochemistry of play literally primes us for relationship building.

The Disturbing Flip Side

Here’s where things get darker. The same mechanisms that make play so effective for legitimate team building make it an ideal vector for manipulation and radicalization.

Recent research from the Extremism and Gaming Research Network (EGRN) reveals how extremist groups systematically exploit gaming environments for recruitment. They use gamification to build trust with potential recruits before gradually introducing extremist content.

Extremist groups modify in-game assets in games like Call of Duty to normalize their ideology “behind the façade of a familiar first-person shooter format.” The immersive nature of these games allows for prolonged exposure, creating opportunities to foster communities that covertly influence players over time.

This isn’t theoretical. Some games function as virtual training grounds where extremists simulate combat tactics. Games like Arma 3 and Escape from Tarkov have become spaces where users practice tactical engagements in realistic environments. The same trust-building mechanisms that make multiplayer games so socially powerful make them perfect for building communities around toxic ideologies.

The Trust Paradox

The paradox is clear: the very qualities that make play such an effective tool for building legitimate teams and communities are precisely what make it dangerous in the wrong hands.

Play works because it bypasses our normal skepticism, creates intense shared experiences, and provides a psychologically safe environment to form bonds. These qualities accelerate relationship building in ways nothing else can match.

This realization should lead to two conclusions:

First, if you’re trying to build a team or community quickly, play is the most effective tool in your arsenal. Nothing will create cohesion faster or more effectively than well-designed collaborative play experiences.

Second, we need to be far more vigilant about how play environments can be weaponized. Parents, educators, and platform managers need greater awareness of how extremists exploit these spaces and better tools to identify when innocent play is being leveraged for manipulation.

Moving Forward With Eyes Open

Understanding play’s power as a trust accelerator gives us both opportunity and responsibility.

For team leaders, the opportunity is clear: replace stale trust-building exercises with genuine play. Create scenarios where team members can demonstrate competence and reliability in low-stakes environments. Design experiences with appropriate challenge levels where success requires collaboration.

For parents and educators, the responsibility is equally clear: be aware of who your children are playing with online and what values are being communicated through that play. Recognize that the intense bonds formed through gaming can be powerful forces for good or vectors for harmful influence.

For all of us, it means acknowledging that trust formation isn’t always a slow, deliberate process. Under the right conditions (which play naturally creates) trust can form with startling speed.

The question isn’t whether play builds trust. The research is conclusive: it does, faster and more effectively than almost anything else. The question is whether we’ll harness this knowledge responsibly, understanding that play’s power to connect us is both its greatest gift and its most significant risk.

Sam Liberty is a gamification expert, applied game designer, and consultant. His clients include The World Bank, Click Therapeutics, and DARPA. He teaches game design at Northeastern University. He is the former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health.