Week 8 Motivation to Play Article

Motivations for Play in Computer Role-Playing Games:
by; Anders Tychsen, MichaelHitchens, Thea Brolund

http://indacan.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/tychsen.pdf



This article focuses on the motivational factors of gamers when playing various role playing games. The authors undertook a study on what motivates game players to play games and what keeps them interested in the game. The article identified ten categories of motivation for playing games: "Advancement, mechanics, competition, socializing, relationship, teamwork, discovery, role-playing, customization and escapism." Looking at these categories they seem like pretty obvious motivational tools for games to employ in order to keep the players interested. In addition to this there were "six principal reasons for video game play: Competition, challenge, social interaction, diversion...fantasy and arousal," which again are crucial elements that most popular and widely successful games employ. In role playing games it was found that, "discovery & immersion and character uniqueness" were the most important motivations for gamers participating in the survey, while "competition, 'grief play,' domination over other players and real-life" aspects hardly contributed to the enjoyment or motivation to keep playing the game.

All in all I found that this article was not very useful as it re-iterated what I already knew about how games motivate people to play. It perhaps defined the specific elements that game designers should concentrate on including in their games, and provided concise lists of these aspects, though the long winded study and data correlation tables were irrelevant and quite frankly boring. As far as incorporating this data into my own idea, I will strive to utilise the concise lists of motivational tools and I will keep the main reasons for game-play in mind to ensure I come up with an idea for a game that will incorporate all of the elements of the most successful games.