Promoting User Agency in Games Using Psychological Motivators

Preface

   In 2015 the world’s Game’s Industry was estimated to be valued at $91.5 billion (Newzoo, 2015), $8.5 billion more and 1 year ahead of the Entertainment Software Association’s predicted $83.0 billion for 2016 (Reid, 2012, p. 70). With such convincing force it has become one of the fastest growing media sectors (US Department of Commerce, 2017) and garnering increasing interest from investors, capital ventures, among others seeking to plant their seed firmly in order to reap the profits from a metaphorical pumpjack. Amongst the field of game design, we are seeing a paradigm shift from designing with gut feelings and intuition from the early days of do-it-yourself design to scientifically calculated tried and tested design. Of course being perhaps the most modern media, spanning little more than 40 years since its inception as an industry, there is much left to learn. Recently, we have seen the rise of mobile games which rely heavily on psychological motivators with user agency being the topic rigorously explored. The purpose of this paper is to deconstruct psychological motivators which encourage user agency from the lens of psychological principles of motivation with the intent of gaining a profound understanding and insight into how one might implementate the concepts in real world game design to consistently yield the desired experience.

Promoting User Agency in Games Using Psychological Motivators

   In the context of games, agency is the sense of being in control. User agency is the motivation of an individual to play a game because they feel in control. With the breadth of games available in the current day, game designers are required to construct systems and mechanics that engross the player and retain them for as long as possible in order to sustain profitability of their games. Yet the volume of games increases year over year and vying for attention is becoming increasingly difficult. Ex Epic Games’ Lead Designer Lee Perry pointed out that 90% of first time players would not play another online multiplayer match for their first-person shooters if they did not get any kills (MrLeePerry, 2017), outlining the significance of properly understanding what motivates players to engage with games. Despite the circumstances, designers are continuously learning new methodologies to cope with demands. One of the most promising frontiers is that of incorporating psychological methodologies to study, understand, predict, and design systems that afford retaining players. For example, using the psychological principles of achievement motive>, affiliation motive, and autonomy motive to increase user agency and enhance the user experience.

   Defining characteristics of achievement motive are the need to master difficult challenges, to outperform others, and meet high standards of excellence (Weiten & McCann, 2016, p. 436). These sources of motivation will have varying levels of impact depending on the person in question as not all humans exert the same amount of confidence (Weiten & McCann, 2016, p. 438) and need for cognition, the desire to challenge the self (SciShow Psych, 2017), as others. However, using these variables it is possible to construct controlling mechanisms to reinforce these sources by creating additional avenues of the same essence.

   To further elaborate, extrinsic motivation is defined as a response in an individual to act in certain ways in order to gain something such as power or possession by way of an external catalyst. In games, these are the typical reward systems including leveling, progression, collectables, and similar. The motivation may be pursued not because the individual has any interest, but because the gain is deemed desirable despite disinterest in the action itself. Intrinsic motivation, then, is defined as the desire to pursue challenge, to outperform, and to meet high degrees of competence by one’s own choice which necessitates that the individual have a strong positive self-perception. It has been shown that people who are superstitious demonstrate “performance benefits produced by changes in perceived self-efficacy” (Damisch, Stoberock, & Mussweiler, T., 2010, p. 1014). That is to say that when the individual perceives themselves as lucky, it eases tension and anxiety which in turn improves confidence yielding significant performance increase of about 35% (SciShow Psych, 2017).

   Weiten & McCann posit that people who actively seek out challenge search for a intermediate challenges; weak challenges are unsatisfying to complete and difficult challenges, while immensely satisfying, are likely less attainable, thus “the probability and incentive value of success are weighted together, moderately challenging tasks seem to offer the best overall value in terms of maximizing one’s sense of accomplishment” (2016, p. 438). Such a description falls neatly in line with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of flow. As he and Asakawa describe “Flow was most likely to appear when the person knew what to do next every step of the way, when the person could tell clearly and immediately if he/she had made a mistake, and when the skills of the person were more or less in balance with the challenges that the activity provided” (2016, p. 6).

   In the early days of World of Warcraft, a massively-online multiplayer game, designers at Blizzard were tasked with resolving a dilemma: how to encourage players to engage in up to two hour sessions and disincentives players from staying logged on for excessive amounts of time. Gamasutra’s Chris Remo recounts:

   Perhaps the most compelling control mechanism in the hands of designers is not the systems they design, but the looking glass through which they can frame their systems. To explain this outcome, we can look to Loss Aversion; the tendency humans have of valuing something received as less than the value of losing the same thing (Novemsky & Kahneman, 2005, p. 120). As in the case of Blizzard, framing the game’s system altered its perception without changing any underlying structure. This is because the framing used changes the anticipated consequence of playing from a negative one, playing too long, to a positive one, whereby playing in small doses benefits oneself. Moreover, this reinforces a fixed schedule where players can reliably come back to a reward stimulus, in effect a positive feedback loop, all while implementing the desired outcome of the game designer.

   This brings about a very powerful tool at the disposal of the designer; the ability to manipulate perception to reinforce desired user agency. A recent thread on Twitter in 2017 by Jennifer Scheurle exposed a sleuth of veteran wisdom when she asked developers to “[describe] some brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling” (Goahmee, 2017). The following are examples from the thread that display various ways into deceiving the user into increased positive self-perception.

   There is a common challenge faced by developers making racing games; creating a responsive AI (artificial intelligence), an algorithm which responds to user input to create challenging agents with which to race against. The common solution used is Rubber-Banding, a “technique used racing games to keep AI drivers near the player in order to maintain the excitement in races” (Rabin et al., 2014, p. 507). However, developers at Senile Team opted for a different approach where “the CPU cars start with high stats which are tuned down every lap” (SenileTeam, 2017). The results being a high tension race where the skill required to complete the challenge may be much greater than the player’s ability, but is progressively lowered until it is achievable. Users feel as though they have mastered a difficult challenge due to the framing afforded by the developers. Narrowly defeating what appears to be challenging AI on a consistent basis will reinforce the users sense of skill. Moreover, the entire task involves eventually outperforming the opponent AI in rapid succession resulting in a flurry of small victories culminating in crossing the finish line.

   Another instance of empowerment comes in how the modern iteration of Doom frames the current state of the player’s health in order to skew their perception of the game’s system. “Doom value[s] the last bit of health as more hit points than the rest of it to encourage a feeling of *JUST* surviving” (Goahmee, 2017). This effectively creates more instances where the player will feel the pressure of defeat looming but enables more time and resources to overcome the challenge. If the player succeeds they will satisfy the need to outperform not truly because of their skill but due to the affordance of the health’s user interface design.

   Consequently such a framework presents itself as a tool to the designer, providing them the opportunity to craft the optimal experience to ensure user agency. Thusly the rule of thumb is any given challenge must be perceived as moderately challenging regardless of its quantifiable difficulty. A challenge perceived as beyond one’s ability or too simple will bias their perceived incentive value or probability of accomplishment, respectively (Weiten & McCann, 2016, p. 438). It is ultimately up to the designer to format the feedback mechanism of any particular game system to produce the desired perception of the system in addition to its functionality within the game as a whole. Moreover, a game’s systems can be further improved with an understanding of the system itself and the perception the user has of that system, skewing feedback in ways that align with the desired balance for the user to experience. While it is not necessary to construct a game system or mechanic with its intended perception in mind, it will inform the design and enable iteration for the feedback mechanism to ensure it strengthens any feeling of challenge mastery, outperformance, and high standards completionism.

   Affiliation motive can be described as “[encompassing] one’s need for companionship, friendship, and love” (Weiten & McCann, 2016, p. 435). The unique aspect of this motive is its human relationship, a motivation that stems from people. Ergo, peer intrinsic and peer extrinsic motivation differ from intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, respectively, as they rely on desires that emerge from the individual due to the relationship with their peers (Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, 2012, p. 3). As they describe,

   Furthermore, peer intrinsic motivation is driven by behaviour that complies with norms and values, known as normative intrinsic motivation, while peer extrinsic motivation is lead by rewards and such as money, power, and recognition (Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, 2012, p. 3). Therefore user agency can emerge from the dynamics of collaborative social groups and settings provided by a game.

   Sources of affiliation motive are derived from collaborative groups and transparency. Social Identity Theory suggests that humans with the same group identity will tend to act for the benefit of the group and discriminate against those outside of it (Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, 2012, p. 3). Transparency refers to any player’s ability to observe another’s abilities and strength relative to their own (Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, 2012, p. 7). Obfuscating passive modes of feedback hinders an individual from formulating their own motives which they create when one “observes that he/she lacks another player’s superior quality, achievement, or possession” (Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, 2012, p. 7).

   Perception is still the most important factor in being able to control these sources of motivation. Transparency can be manipulated to present the player with clear distinctions between ingroups and outgroups, the relative power between them, and presenting rewards for collaborative work. Collaborative groups can be formed through player controlled formation or system controlled formation. The former lets the player select their own group, whereas the latter delegates teams based on an internal game system such as a matchmaking algorithm.

   World of Warcraft’s guilds are run by individuals who create player associated groups. In this way, the players are in control of who they associate with and can partake in multiple guilds should they choose. Players govern the desired behaviour, establishing the normalized behaviour they should expect from that group. Furthermore, the game’s raids which see guild members work together present communal risk forcing players to collaborate in order to complete the quest. The following is a quote from an anonymous player surveyed by Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, (2012),

   The excerpt outlines the pressures exerted by the game’s raid missions in allowing little in the room for error. Pressure helps foster a greater sense of comradery and expectations that each will work for the benefit of the team. Thus, to create such tension the designer needs to be aware of the emergence in social dynamic that their system affords. Given the risks involved in a raid, players will not only aim to self-improve, it has been shown that experienced players are likely to provide help to any player regardless of group as fosters positive environments and subsequently betters team performance (Kong, Kwok, R. C., & Fang, 2012, p. 7)

   Autonomy motive is the need for independence (Weiten & McCann, 2016, p. 415). This arises from the desire of self-expression and competence within their environment. In the context of games, this means that a player may wish to have influence in the digital world they engage with. Control in the context of autonomy motive is relative to the game itself and not particular to dominance over other players.

   Kim et al. (2015) identify that customization promotes a very strong sense of autonomy because it is directly linked to the freedom to make choices (p. 695). Parameters that provide the user with choices ranging from tasks, goals, difficulty, and customization.

   Customization can be categorized by two purposes; aesthetic customization and functional customization. The former handles aspects such as visual preferences in the user interface such as fonts, font size, colours, themes, and the player’s avatar in which identity emerges as the proponent force while the latter deals with altering task-based goals such as delegating abilities in a skill tree or selecting which set of armor to use (Kim et al., 2015, p. 696). Kim et al. (2015) demonstrated that “[i]ndividuals who reported greater feelings of attachment to their avatars also reported greater levels of autonomy” (p. 700). However functional customization yields stronger feelings of autonomy as the player continually interacts with their choices, reinforcing a sense of control (Kim et al., 2015, p. 703).

   Kim et al. (2015) also found that players perceived a greater sense of autonomy when the game had natural mapping (p. 697). For games, this can be formalized as verisimilitude, the appearance of the input device as true or replicating the functionality of a real-world object. Atari’s 1979 arcade game Lunar Lander used a lever to simulate a spaceship thruster. In essence it creates a simple one-to-one mapping that is natural or sensical to a player unfamiliar with the game but that may have experience with similar physical devices. Modern shooters use the right-hand trigger as the fire button because it affords being pulled like a gun trigger assuming that most players will be right-handed. In less conventional games like Capcom’s Luigi’s Mansion Arcade players use a vacuum-shaped controller which they aim at the screen, pushing a button to turn it on and suction on-screen obstacles. Input devices that afford its functionality enable players to become immersed more easily and with greater conviction (Kim et al. 2015, p. 697).

   Games that allow systems of authorship also enhance the sense of autonomy. The game Second Life not only enables players to create content but gives them complete intellectual property rights of it. Herman, Coombe, & Kaye explain that player-authorship is expressed autonomy and by creating avatars, spaces, and artifacts they may satisfy that need (p. 194). Furthermore, user generated content is an intersecting between affiliation motive and autonomy motive as user generated content lends itself to producing communities and ingroups as content resonates with certain groups.

   Each social motivator has a unique role in how it affects user agency. As a game designer, it is important to understand what each one is capable of and why in order to effectively use them in practice. Using framing and altering the perception of a game’s systems and mechanics, one can instill a greater sense of accomplishment in a player without modification of underlying algorithms or systems. By constructing clear boundaries between groups of individuals, allowing them to perceive qualities of other players, and by rewarding collaborative efforts, affiliation motive can bind players together and engage in multiple levels of motivation. Finally, by allowing users the ability to modify game elements, or produce content on their own, and by designing input systems to afford gameplay, users will perceive higher degrees of autonomy and satisfaction from their interactions. In conclusion, achievement motive is the most important aspect as it underlines all types of motivation explored with which all other motivations work from. However all motives are useful when applied in the appropriate context. The ideal game designer has the ability to warp perception in the desired way and will ensure that players feel in control and feel intrinsically rewarded.