Theory of Gaming Motivation. Purpose: To model the psychological reasons people play video games. Relevance: To help understand how video games can help us and hurt us. Think of such fields as video game addiction and video games in education. The Model There are 11 basic psychological needs that people can fulfill by playing video games. The 11 basic needs are gaining knowledge, gaining and improving skills, feeling competent, persevering through hard times, creating tools, managing danger, regulating emotions, competing for rewards, cooperating for rewards, caring for loved ones, and satisfying the senses with pleasant inputs (sights, smells, sounds, etc.).
We do not always feel the 11 basic needs for what they are. Theory of Gaming Motivation The Reasoning The basic assumption in the model is that all healthy people have a number of basic needs that they are motivated to fulfill for their own sakes. If we now look at video games we can see three major psychological rewards at work. Achievement Recognition Satisfaction. Designing for Motivation. The importance of a game's experience depends on the how much general interest it can generate. Creating and keeping the player’s interest is the way to manage his motivation. His motivation is the factor that will determine if a player will continue playing after a few minutes, as well as how long he will play and whether he will finish the game. As game creators, we have the advantage of knowing that the player is motivated when he starts a game, because the player has already taken the first steps: both buying and launching the game on his PC or console (this motivational work has been done by marketing).
This is where we step in, seizing these invaluable moments when the player starts playing. These are the very first minutes when we must deploy a maximum of ingenuity and design. The player’s action responds to a paramount need which we should never forget or undermine – that is, HAVING FUN (everything else just serves to increase the intensity of the game experience). The story? Games and your brain: how to use gamification to stop procrastinating.
1.4K Flares Filament.io 1.4K Flares × It is Thursday afternoon. Hump day. You are being humped. The one thing you wished to accomplish today remains unaccomplished, sitting there as a painful reminder of your failure, goading you to check Tumblr just one more time. You lack motivation, clearly. This is not a problem you would have with, say, video games. And there’s your answer! Turning repetitive tasks into games is the secret sauce to getting things done. Where did gamification come from in the first place? The idea behind gamification—challenge, motivation, reward— have been present in video games from the start, and it was gaming’s growth from niche to mainstream in the 2000s that helped push game mechanics into new industries and fields.
Gabe Zichermann, author of Game-Based Marketing and CEO of Gamification.co, believes the success of Foursquare and Zynga and the effectiveness of gamified marketing helped the new idea flourish. Why our brains are so attracted to playing games 1.) 2.) The Ultimate Motivation Hack. Image courtesy of Hacksomia Ahh, motivation hacks! If you’re anything like me, you have tried dozens of motivation hacks in your life, with varying degrees of success. (Ever tried the one of spinning a dead cat around your head thirteen times in a graveyard at midnight during full moon? No? Thankfully, your search is now over! I’m not just going to throw a simple technique at you. Okay, ready? Why do you need a motivation hack anyway? Let’s face it. Pause for a moment and think about it. When I was a kid I used to jump out of bed at 6 am on the weekend, all excited. Notice something? So if you’re looking for a motivation hack, that means you don’t really WANT TO do something.
In a moment, I will share the Ultimate Motivation Hack with you. Why bribing yourself doesn’t work: Let’s say you have some writing that you want to get finished. Nooooo! “But it works!” Well, yes and no. Through bribing, you don’t get yourself to the point where you WANT to do something. The Ultimate Motivation Hack. Reverse Hack Video Game Psychology to Increase Real Life Motivation (and Why We Play Video Games Instead of Living Life) | J.D. Moyer. Is it time to uprez your game? Well-designed games, more than any other form of entertainment, directly hack into our motivational substructures. They play into our desire to achieve status, collect things, complete tasks, explore the unknown, solve mysteries, be powerful, and make tangible progress (otherwise known as “leveling up”). Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker Video game theorist Ian Bogost explores and satirizes this aspect of games with his Facebook metagame Cow Clicker.
The game is maximally minimalistic; all you do is click on a virtual cow at regular intervals (the game that Cow Clicker satirizes, Farmville, is a mass social networking game phenomena with more users than Twitter, netting hundreds of millions in revenue for its creators). Bogost states that his game “distills the social game genre down to its essence.” His point is that game architecture can be distilled into simple psychological tricks the designer uses to engage the player. Avatar design: "Rockband Redshirt"
How to hack your motivation and squash that to do list. If one thing unites entrepreneurs, it’s our high expectations. We demand a lot from ourselves and are merciless in our self criticism when we don’t do enough. It’s good to want to do more. When entrepreneurs feel like they’re not doing enough, they’re usually right. If you actioned even half of the things you tell yourself you should, your life would be transformed. Some folks will tell you to suppress ambition, to live simply and go easy on yourself. My view is different. Relentless ambition should be encouraged. Through the impossible tug of war between fulfillment (aka stillness) and desire (movement), we will create extraordinary lives. So keep an eye on “balance” and avoid any serious burn-outs. For my entire adult life, I’ve been obsessed with motivation.
Confession time: It’s because I was very, very lazy. Growing up at the tail end of the most sustained period of economic growth in human history, I was apathetic toward almost everything. Motivation Hack 1: Social Dynamics.