rwarnking
commented
3 months ago 10.07.2024 Discussion
Games generally contain content that needs to actively experienced by the player. This means, that the player for example needs to fulfill tasks or overcome challenges. Consequently the game needs to provide content that incentivizes the player to continue playing or keep going. With this tag we want to find an abstraction for mechanics that trigger such behavior.
Generally Motivations can be divided into three groups:
- incentive before doing something (triggers anticipation and curiosity)
- rewards after doing something
- punishments
Incentives usually do not directly reward the player, but the reward could be implizit or rather intrinsic for example when practicing a game in the hopes of improvement (Dota 2). Extrinsic motivations on the other hand directly reward the player with new content like better weapons or experience points. This can be understood as an active reaction of the game to what the player is doing. Finally punishments are on the opposite side, trying to either challenge the player or enforcing a certain behavior.
Other less clear motivations are randomness and novelty. While randomness is a mechanic often used to motivate playing a game multiple times, novelty is an internal motivation allowing the player to feel good when experiencing new content.
Following this we wondered whether rewards can be divided again. For the moment we came up with these options:
- progression
- upgrade
- novelty
Unfortunately it is difficult to clearly define the differences between progression and upgrade, which both imply a type of improvement and between upgrade and novelty, since upgrades certainly imply new and unseen content.
Example rewards as a game mechanic
To get a better overview across possible abstractions and what they entail we collected game features on a mechanical level.
- improve character
- skills
- stats
- resources
- mechanical feedback
- visual feedback
- highlight (Dota 2 streaks)
- win/lose screen
- progress log
- progress tracker
- auditory feedback
- audio-jingles (bing)
- announcer (Dota 2 streaks)
- praise by NPCs
- ranking systems
- leaderboard
- post game review
- highscores
- unlock content
- rewards (XP, items)
- difficulty
- permanent death
- adaptive difficulty
- triumphant feelings (superiority)
- completionist
- multiple storylines
We also iterated some games and assigned them some keywords according to the categories.
| game | progression | upgrade | novelty | incentive | punishment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antichamber | global progress tracker (overview map) | new skill/mechanic (weapon) | unlock new content, level, riddles | ||
| The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition | continue story, quest log | XP, Level up, character progression | get consumables, items, money, companion | win battles | |
| FTL: Faster Than Light | get consumables, money | get items, units | unlock spaceships | win battles, maximize gain, challenging | permadeath |
| DARK SOULSâ„¢: REMASTERED | - | - | - | - | permadeath |
| Gris |
Searching for definitions related to this issue, we found a graphic that was similar to our ideas, but had some differences. Even though it was and might be helpful in the future we still were not able to pinpoint the concrete tags and categories we wanted to use moving forward.
 Quelle
Open Questions
- Clear up when which tag should be used.
- Where does the motivation subtree go?
- Add Feature to collacode that allows to limit the view to games that everyone tagged.
Spawned by:
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Related to:
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01.06.2024 Discussion
Possible motivation might be related to:
We devised three main categories these motivations can be assigned to:
Related Changes