In-game motivation

We have reached a point in our work where we've covered the general background and concepts of gamification. It's time to dig into the psychological aspects behind the obviously successful mechanisms of games. 

People are different and are experiencing things differently. What triggers certain emotions and behaviours for one person might have an entirely different effect on another. Thus, to successfully develop a game for a given audience you need to be aware of what type of gamers who are going to use it. Some people play games solely to compete, some to explore a new virtual world and others to meet and interact with other gamers. When games, as in this case, intend to change people’s behaviours to fit a clear purpose (increase awareness of the consulting model, increase motivation, etc.) it’s vital to get the right input from the future gamers themselves. Failing to design the game accordingly might be fatal. A highly competitive game, for example, might be demotivating for non-competitive employees and end up being contra-productive. 

One of the first researchers to analyse the ethnography of online game players was Richard Bartle. Bartle is one of the co-developers of the first MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), MUD1 in 1978. MUD1 is the first digitally created virtual world and one of the first games that could be played more freely. Thus, the game experience was depending on the gamer. Bartle tried to categorise players after how they experienced and acted in different parts of the game.  What he came up with was a chart where players could be ploted after in-game behaviour and four main categories were identified; killers, achievers, socialisers and explorers. These four main categories are still well-known and recognised. 

                                   ACTING

                  Killers            |                  Achievers

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          PLAYERS -------------------+------------------- WORLD

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                  Socialisers        |                  Explorers

                                INTERACTING

But attempts to understand human motivation has been made long before Bartle and the theories of motivation differ widely. Sigmund Freud, the originator of psychoanalysis, claimed that there is only one driver for human behaviour; sex. Even though many psychologists acknowledged sex as a big motivator they wanted to expand the list. Freud’s student Carl Jung, for example, thought that our biggest driver is a general will to live. Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence made their own model of human incentives to explain behaviour. Instead of motivators they discussed different learned and unlearned drivers such as the drive eat and how these drivers ad up differently for people forming different motivators. B.F Skinner (1904-1990) went against the stream and urged his fellow psychologists to see to the individual. He claimed that since there are no scientific ways to establish human motivators they couldn’t be generalised for everyone. He concluded that you have to ask each individual to extract his or her motivators. Another famous contribution was made by Abraham Maslow in 1943 when his presented the article “A Theory of Human Motivation”. Maslow identifies five major needs; self-actualisation, esteem, love/belonging, safety and psychological needs. He also claimed that even if these needs do co-exist, people prioritise between them in a certain order.

Steven Reiss, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the Ohio State University, USA, have a slightly different approach, compared to Bartle, in his book "Who Am I". Reiss doesn't attempt to group people. Instead he  tries to identify a set of motivators, or desires, and claims that you can learn a lot about an individual by having them grading each of these desires.  An important point is that he tries to do so by empirical studies, which is surprisingly rare. Most of the theories in the area lack sufficient scientific evidence. Reiss came up with 328 goals and had 401 participants rate each goal after importance. They had a computer try the many thousand different combinations possible for making the categories and did this for 10 to 20 categories. The goal was to optimise the number of categories to capture as many of the 328 goals as possible but at the same time have a complexity that was reasonable. The result was 16 categories. If less were used some important goals would be excluded and with more, the complexity would be too great. These 16 categories of root meaning, or motivators, forms the base of his book “Who Am I” and are used as Reiss tries to explain human behaviour.

These are the 16 motivators:

• Power - the desire to influence others
• Independence - the desire for self-reliance
• Curiosity - the desire for knowledge
• Acceptance - The desire for inclusion
• Order- the desire for organisation
• Saving - the desire for collect things
• Honour - The desire to be loyal to one's parents and heritage
• Idealism - the desire for social justice
• Social contact - the desire for social companionship
• Family - the desire to raise one's own children
• Status - the desire for social standing
• Vengeance - the desire to get even
• Romance - the desire for sex and beauty
• Eating - the desire to consume food
• Physical activity - the desire to exercise our muscles
• Tranquility - the desire for emotional calm

In this thesis we aim to produce a well-designed custom made gamification system for CyberCom. We will therefor continue our research about how we can analyse people's motivation and try to find ways to translate those motivators to proper game mechanisms.

Stay in the game!