Joe Hilgard
Why do we play games? Recently, research has started to apply theories from motivation psychology to understand why people enjoy the games that they do. This is Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), and it is rapidly gaining popularity in game studies.
Self-Determination Theory (SDT) proposes that all people have three basic psychological needs. The first is autonomy, the feeling of being in control of one’s own actions, as opposed to being controlled or commanded by someone else. Next is competence, the feeling of having ability, growing in skill, and being able to meet challenges. The last is relatedness, the feeling of caring for and being cared for by others. Self-Determination Theory predicts that people will find an activity intrinsically motivating (that is, they will want to do it for the sake of doing it, rather than to earn a reward) to the extent that it meets these three psychological needs.
A psychologist named Andrew Przybylski has done some promising early research looking to whether games satisfy these psychological needs. In one study, Przybylski had participants either play a critically well-reviewed game (Ocarina of Time) or a critical flop (A Bug’s Life 64). Players who played the better videogame not only reported enjoying it more, but they also reported greater feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In another study, participants played three different videogames, all equally well-reviewed. Participants turned out to like these games more or less depending on the extent to which they felt that these games met their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
We can conclude that, to at least some degree, people are playing games to satisfy their psychological needs. This research raises three questions. The first, the subject of today’s piece, is a psychology question: do people play games for reasons other than to satisfy needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness? The second is a design question: How can we make games which best satisfy people’s psychological needs? The third is a personality psychology question: what is it about a particular person that determines whether a certain game meets or fails to meet their needs?
Autonomy
Personally, I find one of these to be much more autonomy-supportive than the other.
The combination of the last two questions reflect my greatest curiosity and greatest criticisms about today’s videogames. To me, games today seem increasingly linear and simple. As best I can understand, linear or heavily proscriptive games should stifle player’s experience of autonomy. It’s clear that open-world games like The Elder Scrolls or MMORPGS are becoming increasingly popular, but at the same time, there is a definite trend towards restrictive games which tell the player what to do and when.
Let’s begin the Two Minutes Hate and pick on Modern Warfare 3’s single-player campaign for a while. We criticize MW3 for being “on rails” because the player feels that MW3 fails to be autonomy-supportive. When the player wants to do something, s/he isn’t allowed to: instead, the player gets pushed out of the way so that s/he doesn’t end up interfering with the next scripted event. The player is not free to explore or make decisions for himself – instead, you spend a fair portion of the game behind a “follow” prompt so that you move through the cinematic setpieces in the way the developer wants you to. Remembering the infamous “No Russian” mission from MW2, the player is forced to participate in a massacre, and the game ends abruptly if the player attempts to do anything but follow orders. At times, one isn’t so much a “player” of Modern Warfare’s single-player campaign as one is a member of its audience.
On the whole, however, people seem to be pretty fond of Modern Warfare’s single-player and other heavily-scripted games like it. What is different between me and the die-hard fans? Maybe I’m just a cranky old coot who has played too many games and knows too well when I’m being railroaded. Alternatively, maybe having played certain games which provided exceptional autonomy (maybe something like Fallout or X-COM or Dungeon Crawl or even board games) raises one’s expectations & turns somebody into a bit of a snob. Finally, it’s also possible that we enjoy on-rails “experiences” like Modern Warfare for reasons not covered by Self-Determination Theory. Maybe it’s simply exciting or spectacular, something that washes over us like fireworks or a rollercoaster, and we find that to be fun or motivating.