Motivation and Fantasy

Challenge: Willing to play the game meanwhile meeting the game intended non-entertainment goals

what makes a game motivating to play?

  • Intrinsic motivation : in fact, intrinsic motivation outperforms extrinsic motivation

Researches

INTRINSIC Motivation!!!

Richard Ryan & Edward Deci Self-Determination Theory

  • Autonomy - Players feel like they are in charge of what they are doing
  • Competence - Players feel like their actions are leading to mastery
  • Relatedness - Designed for a sense of connectedness between all involved players. We all want to belong and feel like we belong somewhere. It’s intrinsic motivating to us.
  • Challenge - Design for an optimal level of difficulty resulting in a flow experience.
    • Flow theory by psychologist mihaly sixxen mihaly - it describes the state that we are in a challenge hit the exact right difficulty level. Not too easy, not too hard. If the diificulty is at the right level, we feel the flow.
  • Curiosity - Deisgned that makes current knowledge seem imcomplete.
  • Fantasy - Design engaging make-believe (modern rpgs)

Here we have 6 keys to intrinsically motivating games, the three principles of of ryan and desi and three motivators that Thomas Malone adds to the list. Challenge, curiosity and fantasy.

How to balance with applied goals?

The lists above can mess well with certain applied goals. For instance, combine fitness with competence. If we make a game in which we show people their progress, that can be very motivating.

Or say a game about language acquisition, that’s build around autonomy. In this game, you would go on these trips to virtual worlds where you meet fascinating foreigners to speak the language.

Might not that easy, say somebody would be able to find a sense of competence in their fitness workouts, they would probably be working out already. If somebody would find a lot autonomy and language acquisition, they would probably already be learning the language. People might not even intereted in these applied goals even though they would be very good for them to pursue anyways.

Brings us back to the problem, how do we motivate somebody to engage with our applied goals if they really don’t care for them. For example, how do you motivate a child to learn math if they don’t even like math. The answer is typically fantasy. For example, what if we would make a math game with high production values and use the avengers theme. Surely children would love to play? If we look at the research of Thomas Malone, that might not actually be the case, while the theme might be motivating, it can also interfere with learning. You see Thomas Malone did some research and he found that not all themes are equally as efficient at meeting certain learning outcomes, in particular the themes that were most effective for learning were the ones that he called Endogenous Fantasies. That means the game’s fantasy goals are the same as instructional goals. Say you are making a game about plant genetics. In the game you might mess with the genes of plants to create new plants or game about chemistry in which you’re puzzling chemical elements to create chemical compounds. In either case, you’re dealing with an endogenous fantasy and according to Malone, that would be optimal for learning.

Exogenous Fantasies on the other hand or games in which the fantasy goals and the instructional goals don’t necessarily line up those are less effective. For example, according to Malone, if we would make a game about spelling in which you have to fight off a zombie apocalypse and save the world through spelling words would be less optimal. That means as designers, we can’t really sugarcoat a really boring topic with a very cool theme because we need to keep our fantasy as close to out instructional goals as possible or maybe not.

Jacob Habgood did the same research but in different angle - example show we do not always need endogenous fantasy for effective learning. The learning happen a the core game mechanics.

He states that the learning materials should not diminish the entertainment elements of a game. The fantasy does not have to be 100% in tune with the instructional goals as long as it is in tune with Core game machanics. He programmed a game to teach the vision . The fantasy of the game of which is something about fighting the skeletons of athletes that were cursed for cheating at the olympics but they are still weaing their jersey numbers ridiculous and entirely exogenous but inherently entertaining.

The mechanics is that to beat a skeleton you have to cleanly divide their jersey number. So a sword is two, a shield is three. A double sword swipe is 4 and so forth. So the skeleton with jersey number eighteen can be defeated using nine swords types of two, three sword shield combos of six, six single sheild bashes of three or two double shield bashes and nine. And also some combinations of all that such as three single shield batches of three and a final sheild batch of nine on top of it. Then you are really mastering your time table and building up some serious competence. In fact, you are adding some autonomy as well since you are deciding how to play the game and might also put you at a more optimal challenge too. So the game does quite well towards intrinsic motivation but the research also showed that it was teaching its players in an effective manner. Students who played the game for a week improved significantly from the control group on a post-test in recognizing heuristic patterns. For example, they recognized that number ending in 0 or 5 can be divided by 5 better than students that had not played the game.

Summary

Design for intrinsic motivation

Make Sure your core gameplay mechanics match the learning goals

Use endogenous fantasy

Discuss:

  • Share a game that was intrinsically motivating to play for you, and describe how it provided a sensee of autonomy, competence and relatedness for you
  • Do you have any examples of educational games that you learned a lot from, even if their themes were completely disconnected from what you were learning?