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The Psychology of Achievement In Playing Games
A post on Pixel Poppers looks at the psychological underpinnings of the types of challenges offered by different game genres, and the effect those challenges have on determining which players find the games entertaining. Quoting:
"To progress in an action game, the player has to improve, which is by no means guaranteed — but to progress in an RPG, the characters have to improve, which is inevitable. ... It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Some people see them as opportunities to perform — to demonstrate their talent or intellect. Others see them as opportunities to master — to improve their skill or knowledge. Say you take a person with a performance orientation ('Paul') and a person with a mastery orientation ('Matt'). Give them each an easy puzzle, and they will both do well. Paul will complete it quickly and smile proudly at how well he performed. Matt will complete it quickly and be satisfied that he has mastered the skill involved. Now give them each a difficult puzzle. Paul will jump in gamely, but it will soon become clear he cannot overcome it as impressively as he did the last one. The opportunity to show off has disappeared, and Paul will lose interest and give up. Matt, on the other hand, when stymied, will push harder. His early failure means there's still something to be learned here, and he will persevere until he does so and solves the puzzle."
With Project Euler or Sudoku, I *have* to learn something in order to master the game. In more random games like ADOM or Angband, even tactical games like Battle for Wesnoth, I cheat like crazy by backing up save files at random events, in order to get further and see more of the game.
So which type would that make me?
So the conclusion is that some people perservere with longer than others while others get bored and don't always fini
This seems to have much broader applications than games. I think this speaks volumes in the realm of business management (efficiency) and human psychology in general.
For Business Management, identifying your "masters" and "performers" would be good for setting up reward systems. Give your masters a tough problem to solve. Give your performers easy repetitive work and ask them to see how quickly they can finish it.
I've noticed that people who make hasty generalizations are generally douchebags ;).
Like in Half-life 2 Episode 2, you have to carry a gnome object across almost the entire game, and put it inside a rocket. It was a nice little challenge.
Seriously, my website pokes fun at people who are not registered members because they are losing "points" for playing the game without being logged in. I find people just get perturbed at losing something intangible and just register to gain what they have lost.
(I still find the game to be pretty addictive)
Name...That...Autocomplete!
what you've noticed is that people who like to show off their skills appear to you to be succesful all the time.
people who like to learn, don't always succeed, so to you, they appear stupid.
ps. my captcha was hostage, which has nothing to do with neither discussion nor post
What do you make of people who are performance oriented until the point inwhich they reach mastery? Eh?
"Queue"? You surely mean "cue".
Circumcision is child abuse.
First one, then the other. There WILL be a lot of them.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Not to oversimplify the article as it interesting but this seems to be in line with learning through failure. Or better, understanding that failing is one of the greatest learning tools we have, no? Numerous books from 'Think and Grow Rich' to 'The Power of Positive Thinking' and just endless links to white papers all documenting this as an important concept to understand as we reach adulthood as for somewhere in between adolescence and adulthood many people seem to loose or forget this concept.
The author's point seems to be this: that RPGs are too easy and make you feel good about yourself, thus they're bad and not worth playing. What ridiculous twaddle. RPGs are as easy or as hard as you decide to play them -- the author complains about strategy versus grind, and then because he gravitates towards grind, it's the game's fault, not the his decision to play a more "mastery"-oriented approach.
Then the author says "And I'm certainly not telling you not to play RPGs - I play them occasionally myself now, confident that now I'm enjoying them for the characters and story and not as a source of fake achievement." -- what is so different from non-RPGs that mean that they prevent the gamer from getting a source of fake achievement?
The entire post can probably be summarized as "I was young and didn't appreciate RPGs for the story, and so RPGs suck". Christ.
Imagine you were watching Lord of the Rings, but there was something wrong with your DVD player and you had to manually advance scenes by hitting a button. And you might have to watch the Battle of the Pelennor Fields a few times before you could make it past the Battle of the Black Gate. Periodically Sam or Aragorn would turn to another character and say something like, "You are so brave and heroic for coming along and helping me. I couldn't do this without you." But these moments would always be filmed in perspective shots, with the characters speaking directly to the camera.
Would you roll your eyes, wishing they'd get on with it? Or would you feel a small but uncontrollable flush of pride? And what would it say about you if you did?"
Now tell me that doesn't just sum up most RPGs and definitely ALL MMORPGS. Granted, there are a few great rpgs out there that have a decent plot, such Baldurs gate.... but even these games tended to wade into the banal the territory the author of this article describes.
I think we can all agree that RPGs are fun, for many reasons. I still like playing the odd rpg. IMO I wouldn't touch a MMORPG with a 10 foot pole as I know I'm prone to falling into the trap the author describes.
The article isn't about not appreciating RPGs, its about realizing on an individual level how they impact and manipulate our personality. Once we become aware of why we act the way we do, we can become wiser. Otherwise, we are just doomed to be slaves to the game. ... or are we already?
I've noticed that fat little virgins who sit at home wanking and playing World of Warcraft and posting snide comments on Slashdot tend to be joyless fuckwits.
Actually I would say that WoW is BOTH. You learn the abilities of your character and learn to apply them to various situations. You then stand around in Orgrimmar/Ironforge "performing" and showing off your leet loots. Also my name is Matt and I have about 5200 achievement points on my main...
Christ, what a stupid article. The author assumes that the reason people play games is to gain a sense of achievement - but that isn't, or isn't the only, reason to play a game. I play games to experience something, to gain through interaction a set of experiences constructed by the game's designers, in the same way I watch films to gain a visual experience constructed by the director, or listen to music to gain an aural experience constructed by the performers. The point of a game is not to "win," any more than that is the point of watching a film.
The upshot of the author's focus on achievement is that he, somewhat mystifyingly, seems to think that the morally superior way to enjoy games is to compulsively repeat the same set of actions until one has fulfilled some arbitrary criteria, gained a certain number of points, or found a certain number of widgets. The author, in other words, has confused "play" with "work". If what he wants is a sense of achievement, why doesn't he go outside and break rocks?
I'd say the WoW experience is closer to the "mastering" than the "performing", but it's 80% "ocd completist".
Actually, the problem is that for most actual skills and tasks there is no such thing as mastery. IRL there is no 450 skill points limit, that you can reach and then relax. And most RL problems are multi-dimensional problems where there is no perfect solution, but least worst compromises. And definitely not where you can max one aspect and proclaim that the others don't matter, which is what OCPD cases... err... perfectionists usually do.
RL "perfectionists" tend IMHO to be one or more of the following:
A) the real, honest kind: people who never finish. I still remember someone who, on the day before the deadline, was still working on his perfect XML parsing project for that project. (A tiny part of the project's functionality, and one he shouldn't have been doing himself: there's Xerxes.) There's _always_ one more optimization that can be done, one more clever trick that can be tried, one more label that would look better one pixel lower, etc. It's harder than you think, being a real bona-fide perfectionist.
B) the fake kind, which are basically just arrogant. They do a crap job, and then proclaim it to be perfect, just because they're that good in their own opinion. Often these are actually an illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the least competent tend to grossly overrate their skills and competence, just because they're not competent to do that judgment. They don't even know what they don't know. And conversely the most competent tend to underrate themselves, because they do have some clue of all the things they don't know.
C) the kind who'll redefine the problem to get a "perfect" solution. As I was saying RL problems are usually multi-dimensional, and increasing one aspect often loses you another. E.g., making a car engine more powerful also turns it into a gas guzzler. E.g., too many options in a GUI can actually make it less usable, or at least harder to also make it usable. Etc. A lot of OCPD kinds take such a variable and genuinely don't seem able to comprehend that it can take other values than 0 and 100%. Either you hit 100% or you're doing a crap job. But they can't hit 100% in all either. So they basically just pick one aspect and proclaim it the only thing that matters, and proclaim everyone who cares about the other aspects to be a clueless idiot. Unfortunately the actual best compromise for an actual user is rarely that. These guys tend to complain a lot that the users are clueless idiots.
D) the bitter whiner. These people rarely make something they'd rate perfect, and some don't even produce anything at all for years, but they complain about everyone and everything else. These people aren't as much into achieving perfection, as into just having something to whine about. Their very criteria for what perfection actually means, are fluid and disposable, often to the extent that they're simply the opposite of what everyone else is doing. E.g., I actually worked with one who, after he had converted the whole team to Linux (not that it was hard in a team of complete nerds) and thus lost that reason to complain, promptly switched to BSD and proclaimed both Windows _and_ Linux to be mainstream crap for idiots. He caused an indentation war fighting for the holy cause of _three_ space tabs, he fought to change the directory where the build script left the built executable, etc.
And a few other archetypes.
And just so it's not completely off topic: you can see the same in MMOs too.
A) There are people who are genuinely trapped into the neverending treadmill of needing every single achievement, every single pet, completing every single quest (even if it's 70 levels below them), paying 1000 gold on the Savory Deviate Delight recipe just because they _must_ have all the recipes in game, etc. Not because they actually need them, but because anything els
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
MMOs any many other kinds of game are addictive because they follow what's known as a "variable interval reinforcement ratio". The variable reinforcement ratio is a very well known and studied phenomenon amongst actual psychologists, having being one of the rock-solid discoveries arising from behaviourism during the 40s through 60s.
Variably reinforced behaviour is the most effective way to create a repetitious behaviour with the highest "resistance to extinction". That means it's pretty much an addiction.
The same finding explains why so much of gambling is highly addictive: the same random intervals of payback are at play.
You can learn more by buying or borrowing any book on classical and operant learning theory.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
How is the perform and master group correlated to perseverance?
Isn't it possible that ppl only interested in the skill/knowledge can just as well abandon the difficult puzzle once he mastered the skill to solve that type of puzzle as a whole?
And isn't it possible that the perform ppl will stubbornly solve the difficult puzzle to prove their talent/intellect?
This article is just a personal opinion by some guy and isn't based on research at all.
There are two types of people, those who classify people into one of two types of people, and those who don't.
If this is new information for game developers, they need to take a fresh look at what constitutes a challenge. In MMO games, this has typically been a grind. I played Aion recently for about 8 weeks and discovered that the game slows to a crawl at some point. This point varies with the player, since "crawl" is subjective. So I dropped my subscription. However, this is not because the challenge was too great - being better at the game wouldn't have made it go any faster. Having better gear for my level also wouldn't have done anything. I'm assuming here that NCSoft views its leveling process as a challenge. In the examples in the summary, the two guys are both happy when they've completed an easy puzzle. There's nothing in there about the guy who gets fatigued after completing a long series of easy puzzles.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Though I do notice that the ones who generalize people as douchebags do so most hastily...
Balderdash!
I could be demonstrably classified as "smart" (for certain definitions of smart), but I usually find RPGs and strategy games quite dull.
The difference might be that I am generally pretty good at action games (thinking mostly FPSes like Counter-Strike, but I have enjoyed a few 3rd person games like Uncharted and Heavenly Sword). Games where my characters skill is decided by a random number generator and/or XP level, or where I have to command a bunch of retarded troops who can't do anything particularly intelligent for themselves, bore me.
I do enjoy some RPGs (traditionally, MUDs) for the community aspects, and I admit I can get addicted to pointlessly gaining levels, but I don't pretend it actually has any bearing on anything at all. With action games, at least I know I am improving my own reactions, coordination and tactics. There is obvious a strong element of tactics to strategy games and RPGs too, but.. I've just never found them much fun for probably the same reason that I'd much prefer to write programs myself rather than manage a team of coders. I can see how it would be rewarding in some ways, but I am the type that prefers to crush new challenges rather than train a bunch of people up and then watch them crush challenges for me.
which is totally what she said
Queue could also work in that context.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
Frequently so, but in this case it appears to be entirely well-founded.
I'm have a performance orientation and I guarantee that this article was written by... nevermind, this shit's too hard...
/me shuffles off to play Neverwinter Nights...
I just don't get... eh, ugh... never mind. This post wasn't worth the research I put into it.
Q.E.D.
my first reaction was that strategy games probably fit the "mastery" group better than role-playing games. when playing a single-player campaign or against AI, you often have to try several different strategies altogether in order to win a scenario, unless the game is set up to be too easy or you're just that good. RPGs, on the other hand, do usually reward strategy but almost always force you to grind away for xp anyway, and it didn't seem that the second group was defined as one that prefers repetitive tasks, but rather learning how to overcome a difficult challenge. well, being more of a strategy gamer, i'm probably biased, but it struck me as odd.
I like both genres. OP is an idiot.
I find it really interesting when I'm losing but unconcerned, an example would be losing to a team in hockey where they are larger/better trained.
It's easy to tell when a group is more experienced/stronger and to know what effort it takes to gain those skills... and sometimes to realize it's not worth it.
An offshoot of this is when I'd be disappointed when I won... my hockey coach didn't understand this at all. Winning was everything to him and to watch me score a goal and shrug... well he didn't take kindly to it.
In volleyball you're supposed to chant "side out" indicating you want the other team to make a mistake and give you a point... I actually questioned the coach about the validity of such a mentality.
Anyway I've found that randomly bumping around on the net finding random games is what turns me on now... get in build a team/learn what everyone's up to... perform better than everyone else and then leave before the winner is decided... great fun and constant stimulation.
Also for those interested in "gamer" mentality and the healthy bravado surrounding it check out
anyone interested in this distinction might appreciate the model described in finite and infinite games by james p. carse. it's a kind of convolution of the tao te ching, distilled down to:
carse might say that performance-orientated people (paul) are occupied with the resulting claim - title, status, accomplishment, authority, etc - that they can make looking back on the win. those that are mastery-oriented (matt) are more concerned with developing ability to continue the play into the ("horizonal" - always in the advancing distance) future.
and
and
(i wonder whether those interested in this kind of topic would more tend towards the mastery/infinite-play perspective?)
anyway, one of the most illuminating books i have read, along with the tao te ching (and, the one other on my paltry list, the politics of experience by r. d. laing).
ken
everything leaks
To progress in an action game, the player has to improve
Don't worry, modern action games are working on that bit as well. Who needs skills when you can't die, you can do complicated multi-hit attacks with a single button, or when QTEs can make even the most complicated task come down to a single button press.
Don't make me get my main on. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7FC-h0Fb8
I don't believe the perform/master is a personality type. At least not all by itself. I think it has at least an activity component as well. Some activities I find inherently interesting to do: play banjo or write computer programs, and other activities are inherently boring to me: golf. Of the activities I prefer to do, there is an element of both mastery and performance. On activities I do not prefer to do, there is never any desire for mastery involved no matter how good I get it at it because the only reason I do 'the activity' is for some other goal such as hanging out with friends.
And knowing there is an internal activity preference and a desire for approval from other humans, the 'successful' training of children probably has more to do with other factors than personality preference for mastery/performance over internally desired activities. When adults choose the activity, that over-rides the child's 'natural' choice so that means it is also over-riding their inherent personality.
Going back to the original story....
This is a very simplistic view of the complex interplay of challenge and reward that many games offer. Most "action" games will enhance the player's abilities through equipment enhancement (weapons, new technology etc) whereas most RPGs also include elements of character enhancement. These are effectively the same thing, you make the player more able to face tougher in-game challenges (often combat opponents). This is the character improvement. At the same time the challenges that the player faces are also ramped up. However, as the game progresses, the player will inevitably get better at facing the challenges (player improvement) - some faster than others of course - but a good game designer will not ignore this, and in most well-designed games the rate of increase of challenge difficulty is faster than the rate of character enhancement. In RPGs the player improvement is masked by the obvious character improvement, but it is still definitely there. Evidence? The world of warcraft players who pay a service to level their character to the level max (currently 80) before they start to play, and don't have the playing skills to face the game challenges they are faced with.
Most people get a buzz from the joy of completion, and most get a buzz from the joy of learning. Some people will favour one over the other, but both are worthwhile. I suspect that most people vary as to which they prefer by mood, and by all sorts of other factors. Good games can not only provide both of these but more also: the joys of exploration, fantasy, creativity, manufacture, competition, collection, adventure, pathos, customisation, catharsis and spectacle (to name a few). Game worlds are usually designed to make the player feel significant, something often sadly lacking in the real world.
The question I'd really like to know the answer to: if learning is so much fun for so many people, why is education so often boring?