Indie Game Business Motivation talk by Diego Ricchiuti
Motivation Theories
Maslov’s pyramid
- Games fulfill only the top level needs, except physiological at this date
Intrinsic vs. extrinsic
Intrinsic motivation
Works for:
- creativity: outsmarting puzzles, solving problems
- mastery: feeling smart and competent
- cooperative social interactions
- stickiness (to core gameplay, w/o metagame and rewards) Risks to the developer:
- risk: designer doesn’t control target audience passion and interest, passion is transient and can fade away > requires to know players well
- risk: requires constant constructive feedback e.g. responses to social interactions, community management etc. > lack of two way engagement leads to depletion
- risk: activity needs to feel impactful on one’s or other people’s experiences: meaningful
Extrinsic motivation
Works for:
- compliance: get people to do exactly what you want
- routine: creating and reinforcing a habit
- incentivisation: foot in the door to start something
- solo activities Risks for the developer:
- risk: reward value needs to exceed perceived cost of the task
- risk: reward fades quickly, rewards value decrease with abundance - habituation leads to constant rewards to become unsatisfactory (marginal utility)
- risk: show-offable rewards have higher value, but showing off can lead to toxicity Risks for the player:
- risk: spending more time/money than desired, healthy up to unhealthy addictions
Self determination theory
Autonomy, Competence and Relatedness is the core of intrinsic motivation. Humans want to become good at what they like doing through growth, development and integrative functions. Games that do well on retention fulfill self determination motivations/needs.
Mastery
- Feedback allows growths / learning from mistakes through constructive, non judgemental negative feedback and celebration of successes.
- Exaggeration of progression helps keep players engaged because they feel like they can do it and build confidence, despite starting out bad.
- Mastery of progressively different mechanics enables players to innovate (mastery can come from dynamically adjusted difficulty or rpg style progression, illusion of skill with advantages, RNG etc.)
Autonomy
- Showcasing consequences of decisions
- Failure is ok, part of the learning process
- 20% of time /safe spaces for experimentation
- meaningful personalization Book: the paradox of choice
Relatedness
- A sense of belonging to a community of players, either through cooperation, competition or co-presence, within or outside the game
- Stories one can relate to
- A cast of characters one can connect with
Example use case
- at the end double your reward by watching a video add makes gives it an intrinsic value, instead of being seen as a necessary evil
- double reward at the start of the run instead of the end results in more views and longer gameplay time (longer runs), felt less annoying, lead to more use of other monetization systems (e.g. 1 more life object)
- Intrinsic motivation to watch ads: part of revenue is given to animal shelter
- Sunk cost fallacy: willingness to act irrationally because of a previous investment e.g. you’ll watch the full movie because you purchased the seat even if it wastes more time. If you watch the video before the gameplay session, you’ve made an investment, so you’re more motivated to play well and to the end to get the best out of your investment, including invest more object to get the best of your investment. Interesting idea: a fallacy is an intrinsic motivation that players see as a positive choice!