What is a game? (the ongoing project part I)

My thoughts on games and play seem to be evolving ^^ , so this blog is already a success to me.

I want to examine my following statement:

“A construct set up to facilitate play might even be the best definition of “game”, because the behaviour of play differs so much it's clearly hard to define universal characteristics of games.”

I guess the form of the construct that facilitates play can vary significantly, but if it didn’t facilitate play it wouldn’t be a game. To say that games are only played would be an understatement. Games are not only played, they are experienced and engaged. Games can be “watched” and enjoyed for their story, like a good tv-show. It’s even possible to live through otherwise dangerous experiences (like war situations or car races) using a game as a simulation. Games may demand strategies to be perfected as a player heads further into the game, a proverbial puzzle test. Some games are action packed to deliver a dose of adrenaline. There are even puzzle games, which makes me doubt if puzzles are not just games. In the end games cater to a wide range of interests.

The more I think about it, all games challenge at least one skill in an enjoyable way. Though the range of interests or skills to be challenged is immensely diverse, the enjoyable challenge that games provide seems a common denominator. Going back to the previous paragraph, it doesn’t have to be the challenge of skill alone that keeps the gamer engaged. Due to their interactive nature, games can create a layered experience without equal. In the end each player interacts with a game in a different way to create their own experience.

Still for a bit of falsification I thought about Minecraft and Lego. At least the original Minecraft was about building with blocks, like Lego but cheaper because you could make as many blocks as you'd like :p . Both can be played with and the play is enjoyable, they can even challenge skills like spatial insight and several creative skills. However they initially support unstructured play. They are building blocks for creation, calling the act of playing with Lego a game would be like calling drawing with pencils a game. In the end all games support play but nog all play needs games. What we call games seem to facilitate at least in part a structured form of play.

Why being social and games is a match

This post will be an extender of my previous post on the Ted talk of Kelly McGonigal on different impact stress can have, depending one the way you view stress. If you see it as harmful, it becomes harmful. If you see the effects of stress (higher heart rate and higher oxygen intake) as helpful to rise to a challenge it's not harmful at all.


Right now I want to explore a second fact she highlighted in her talk. Another hormone that's produced during stress is oxytocine. It's kind of the new super hormone that neuroscientists pride around with, but still let's have a look. This hormone makes you more likely to engage in social behaviour. So stress makes you more likely to be social. Social contact during stress can give you all kinds of benefits like help, support and banding together to have a revolution. Social contact in turn releases more oxytocine, and oxytocine helps shield your body against possible negative effects of stress. It also stimulates the regeneration of heart cells, repairing damage.

One factor that is mentioned a lot as a motivator to play games is social contact. This factor totally mystified me and probably will in more or lesser degree for a long while (I'm a solo player mostly). Before the age of computer generated adversaries games were table top games and the like, demanding a human counterpart. Humans can of course be challenging to play against and with. Still humans in those times were necessary, maybe you just liked the game and other players were a prerequisite to actually play.

However a uses-and-gratifications approach to games teaches us that games can also be used making a plea for social contact as a motivator to game. We can't deny that (with a few exceptions of course) we are social animals that reap many benefits and joy from social contact. Looking a players as a whole this means that one group of players simply plays because they like playing with other players, known or unknown to them. Games always seem to lower the boundaries for reaching out to others, like a kid meeting other kids by picking up a ball. (This makes me wonder how prevalent other factors of motivation are in people that are highly motivated to play a game because of social factors.)

Still I think that social contact is not always a motivator but can just as well be a result of video games. To become good at certain games like shooters you need peers to rise against, practice against and learn from. This the players that really like shooters more likely to meet other people.

Extending on the talk by Kelly, there's another group. Games certainly can be stressful and it's impact and outcome can vary to great extremes as demonstrated by the video. Certain players will have negative effects because of stress in games and even those who don't experience them can lower their stress level even more by engaging in social contact. Games can even make you more social, who would have guessed? Certainly not conservative digi haters.

Confession of a Nord

It began previous summer. During a long episode of die-hard studying and personal development I promised myself to have a gaming spree. I'd get a heavy duty pc that would play games on ultra-high graphic settings and I stacked up on games during steam summersale. So it came to be.

My steam account is full of wonderful games that allow for a high level of immersion and my graduation present has an i5, 16GB ddr3 ram and 2GB ddr5 graphic card. It takes 20 seconds to boot fully, heck I can't even sit down properly before it's finished booting. Around 6 weeks dedicated to gaming went by in a breeze. I didn't even care for that for a feeling of accomplishment, I was just gone for a while.

The game I played most (by far) was Skyrim. It was a sense of true freedom I felt, and some stories truly thrilling. Till now I haven't played a game with a story as AWESOME as Chrono Trigger, but still it came close. By now I've put in over 600 hours of gameplay in total, about 15 weeks of 40 hour work. Yesterday I even did some real research concerning the lore of the game, and discovered that there were many layers of depth still to be discovered.

Last week I went to Spil Games for a job interview, it ended up not being my cup of tea. But still I was asked a question I hadn't asked myself in a while, "why are you so fascinated by games?" . After my thesis on motivation in games and this gaming spree it's time for a recap. Talking and writing about games and the interplay of game and psychology always lights a spark in me. No other medium been able to capture me so deeply while allowing me so much freedom, even if the freedom is only imagined. And that link created by the interplay of the self and a thing is truly mesmerizing to me.

Games do not simply provide a few things like emotional stimulation, no it's far more elegant. Games trick players in seeking out what they want and need. It's easier for a game so to say to entertain a media user than a movie for example. The director has to try and match the movie to what he/she things the needs of the audience are. There's no going back after the movie is shot. Some games trick players to create their own movie.

How does this interplay arise?
First of all the identification processes, each character you play, you play in your own way. The actions are not only related to the character but also to yourself. This creates a bond that is potentially far stronger than any other medium. Open world rpg's like Skyrim and probably GTA take this even farther, allowing you to fully customize your character. Stories allow for further identification and can give more depth to the character.

A second part that's very true is the challenge you feel during certain parts of the game. Games that have an unbalanced difficulty curve are not nice to play and break your personal movie. The challenge is preferrably created by different elements but mainly with cognitive challenges and puzzles (could have been better though in Skyrim) and skill challenges (like fighting) that generally requiere a certain level of mastery of the game mechanics. Skyrim allowed me to pursue the skills that I felt were challenging

A third part is arousal, from adrenaline rushes to pure joy after surviving an ordeal. I can not even count the times I was suddenly startled by a hidden enemy, or sometimes the thrill of chasing and facing something. This arousal can be experienced as a refreshing shake up from mundane life. Luckily probably, I wouldn't want that many "Ooooh shit" moments as in games.


Still something that precedes this all is the gratification of interest. People select to a certain degree their media on their interest. Though interest is a pretty vague concept in my opinion, we still follow it. Things that stimulate my fantasy are always on the top of my list.

What game did you spend a significant part of your lifetime on?

The art of Collecting

One of the game mechanics that is used both in games and gamification is collecting. Collecting has such a nostalgic feeling, between the ages of 9 and 12 my collecting behavior exploded. I grabbed whatever I could get and arranged it in a hundred different ways (arranging is important). I still have coins, pottery, gems, minerals and hundreds of stamps lying around from that period. Even games I play now want me to collect, for example in Skyrim (I've played a bit to much lately) I collect books with ingame lore, within the game.

Flickr: What What

However every forum seems to spawn badges to collect. Mostly they are so uninspiring, that I wonder why they bother to put them there in the first place. Badges used to mean something, like military medals or boyscout awards. Basically they have to be really cool (why only make a picture badge on the internet if you can make them interactive?).

Interestingly collecting behavior gets triggered from the age of 9 or a bit before. It's an emerging form of behavior in the concrete operational stage of human development.The brain is developing rapidly around this age. Collecting fits the demand for stimuli very well. First of all it stimulates memory strategies of organizing, kids can rearrange their marbles in hundreds of different categories. The ability of selectivity developing, by discerning one collection piece from others. Collecting certain tokens also increases control of cognitive processes by training to ignore distractions. It's quite a feat to select a blue cat eye marble from a pile of mixed ones. Even at later stages of life this may be quite interesting, Lego-holics seem to keep selecting and rearranging the cubes. What about the hoby clock-maker? Collecting parts of machines just add layers of complexity to overcome.

So collecting badges can be much more than just collecting dull pictures, they can stimulate development of several kinds of behavior.


Literature

Bukatko, D. (2007). Child and adolescent development: A chronological approach. Houghton Mifflin College Div.

Task Motivation a starting point for game research

During my internship I wrote a summary of literature on task motivation specifically to be applied in research on games and learning. In the coming weeks I'll post translated parts of the theory section online for those interested. It serves to be a solid guiding framework into motivation to engage  different elements in games. This in turn can be measured.

Motivation to engage a task can have both an intrinsic and an extrinsic component (Lepper, Corpus & Iyengar, 2005). The intrinsic component stimulates task engagement out of a desire for challenge, pleasure and interest (Lepper et al, 2005). This is called intrinsic motivation.

The extrinsic component stimulates task engagement out of a desire for external reward or dodging punishment. This is called extrinsic motivation. If there's no internal or external stimulus to engage a task it's called amotivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985).

These motivation components are non-homeostatic drive-forces to engage a task (Gorman, 2004, White, 1959), motivation that holds no relation to direct physical needs like hunger and thirst. The concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have originated from the comments of White (1959) on the drive theories of motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985; Harter, 1978; White, 1959). The drive theories of motivation ascribe task motivation and desire to learn to a desire for external rewards or dodging of punishment. White (1959) used a variety of sources to show that external stimuli alone, are inadequate to explain the full range of human behaver like discovery, play, and a desire to deal with one's surroundings competently.

White (1959) proposed that many behaviors are explained better from a desire to deal with one's surroundings competent and effectively. Harter (1978, 1981), Deci and Ryan (1985) and others after him have operationalised the concepts White (1959) proposed too subsequently test it. His critique has since been tested and supported with evidence. A large part of this research has been done in the context of children and their development in education, some even longitudinal.

Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation have their place during the development of children. Though time after time research has shown a correlation between school results and intrinsic motivation for school (Lepper et. al, 2005). Partly because of this, intrinsic motivation is seen as superior to extrinsic motivation. However if a child is amotivated to engage in a certain task at school, rewards may be applied to increase task motivation through extrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 1985, pp. 263-264).

Literature

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self determination in human behavior. New York: Plenum.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1987). The Support of Autonomy and the Control of Behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1024-1037.

Eisenberger, R., Pierce, W. D., Cameron, J. (1999). Effects of Reward on Intrinsic Motivation- Negative, Neutral, and Positive: Comment on Deci, Koestner, and Ryan. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 677-691.

Gorman, P. (2004). Motivation and Emotion. New York: Routledge.

Harter, S. (1981). A new self-report scale of intrinsic versus extrinsic

orientation in the classroom: Motivational and informational components.

Developmental Psychology, 17, 300–312.

Lepper, M. (1983). Extrinsic Reward and Intrinsic Motivation: Implications for the Classroom. In Levine, J.M. & Wang M.C. (Eds.), Teacher and Students Perceptions: Implications for Learning. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum

Lepper, M. R., Corpus, J. H., & Iyengar, S. S. (2005). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivational orientations in the classroom: Age differences and academic correlates. Journal of

Educational Psychology, 97(2), pp.184–196.

White, R.W.(1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence. Psychological Review, 66(5).

Upcoming posts

It's my holliday thus I won't be posting for a while. However when I et home I'll be posting on cognitive and emotional engagement, curiosity and interest, different motivational measures and a reward framework for serious games that doesn't affect intrinsic motivation. For now happy holliday!