Motivating Design

After spending some time on TED.com I've been intrigued by the concepts and ideas of defining human motivation.

This video in particular by Dan Pink (embedded below, go watch it now.) he talks about motivation and how to get the most of your employees. In addition to being an excellent speaker, the topics he covers are very interesting to me and relate to game design.



He introduces The Candle Problem developed by Carl Duncker and the concept of Functual Fixedness, then introduces an incentive into the equation. The results are not what most people would expect. They found that when giving people a problem requiring creative thinking, any form of incentive produced negative results. Compared to the positive results of the same problem without incentives. While performance based on non-creative problems, incentives work great. This boils down to extrinsic motivators vs intrinsic motivators and their relations to creative vs routine work. The simple conclusion of the video and the experiments is that rewards narrows focus.

While the study, topic, or intent has nothing to do with gaming directly. I feel that the concepts can be applied, especially in the MMO world. Anytime a problem or a path is set in front of a player we, as designers, are asking them to provide us with a solution. We've given them the problem and we are asking them to resolve it. By no means is a player forced to resolve anything. It's a video game, the player can turn it off at any time, they have the option of just getting up and walking away. Of course, we don't want that. We want players to rise to the challenge and to enjoy the process, such is the art of design.

Now, with the perspective that we are giving the players problems to resolve, we have to next look into how we are going to incentivize the resolutions, which ties back into the statement on motivation. Many of the problems we assign to players are so minor that we often don't even realize we are asking something of them, or they don't realize that they are being given a choice. This is wonderful in most situations, as the purpose of a game isn't to 'bog us down with choices' but to 'enjoy an experience'. In order to help players to enjoy their experience, we need to correctly identify their motivations and try to mold those and control them into the desired pace and purpose.

Extrinsic motivation is the easy part. Taking in the lessons from Dan Pink, this type of motivation can actually increase results when it comes to non-creative problem solving. "Shoot the clown 100 times and get a reward" would be an example where an extrinsic motivator would give us drastically better results. This can be seen with grinding in the MMO world. With these mindless repetative tasks, giving us "shinies!" is an easy solution.

Intrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Luckily, Mr. Pink again gives us some information that help us to build and nurture intrinsic motivation. He briefly touches on the topics of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, as the three pillars of intrinsic motivation. In order to fully understand this, we're going to have to look at each one of these individually.

We'll start with Autonomy. This can be defined as being independent or self-governed, using the straight dictionary definition, anyone can argue that as a person they are Autonomous. Within the world of games though, characters are often designed to NOT be autonomous. This seems logical, as the social dynamic is one of the key draws to an MMO environment. So in the gaming world (or at least the MMO world) the question becomes "How do we build autonomy and still require social interaction?" The answer here is accountability. Even in a group, each character has to feel attached to their own roles. They have to feel autonomous within that role. I have to know that, as a healer, these are my responsibilities and I am accountable for those. Every person needs to feel that they are in charge of their own situation at all times. I have to know that I am capable of completing my task, and that every single tool needed is provided for me. Autonomy is one of the easier pillars to design for. Why? Because the game is typically designed around this without people actually thinking about it. Would you design a mechanic into a game that was impossible for a player? Surely not. The simple desire to not punish our players forces us to design with Autonomy in mind.

Pillar number two is Mastery. The ability to have expert knowledge or skill at your chose task. My peers have argued that the ability to achieve mastery is always present to all players and is something that's to be left fully in the players' hands and not something that we should design for. I disagree. I think that players should always feel that they have the tools and information to obtain mastery available to them. Due to be constantly surrounded by hardcore gamers (and being somewhat hardcore myself) the idea of going to a website for strategies or spreadsheets doesn't seem odd at all. While it's wonderful that the community has banded together to provide these resources to itself, it also limits these resources to a small number of players. In order to provide players a path to mastery, we have to give players access to information and a way to use that information. Practice makes perfect, we've all heard the age old saying, and it rings true now as much as ever. Players have to be given a way to practice, a way to develop mastery without breaking the immersion or flooding over into the real world. We have to facilitate and nurture growth if we ever want a player to obtain mastery. Information + implementation = mastery. You see a lot of this in fighting games, with full moves lists, practice modes, and challenges, all of which are designed to give players an avenue to explore and achieve mastery. While we can't force everyone to explore this route, more players will if the path is right there in front of them, rather than them having to go out and seek the path out first.

Purpose, the third pillar. Here's the kicker. A sense of purpose is often times a motivator on it's own. Purpose is the reason you are doing what you are doing. In games, this can be the story, the group, the raid, anything that connects us to something larger than our lonesome. Games have tried everything in the book to attach with the player, to give them a feeling of purpose. This is also such a unique niche from person to person. If you actually break it down, it seems a herculean task. How can I make a person really connect with pixels? This is heavily dependent on the audience you are appealing to. People who play fighting games religously probably don't need a lot of story to get them into the game. These players feed on competition, their purpose IS the mastery and using that mastery to triumph over another player. Compare this to your typical action adventure gamers, these players are often interested in the story itself. They want a main character that they can relate to, someone that they can see some semblance of themselves in. Taking this character (that they relate to) and going on fantastic adventures and completing impossible tasks gives them a sense of purpose because they feel intimately attached to their characters. Next we see social gamers. The people who play because all of their friends play. These people need to have the tools available to them to allow them to really connect with other players and to get their "social fix" from the game. Of course, the world isn't limited to these three classifications of players, what's important here is that we define who we are designing for, then we can flesh out the purpose and design with that in mind. If the purpose is meaningful to your players, they will embrace it lovingly.