Games and motivation

[simont]

mooism recently posted a link to a web game called ‘Tringo’: http://www.donnerwood.com/tringo.html.

He said his current high score was 278, so I had a go at the game to see what would happen. For those unwilling to go and play it themselves, the game involves trying to fit a sequence of loosely Tetris-like pieces into a square grid, and getting points for forming a complete rectangle of filled squares which then vanish. If you can't fit a particular piece in at all, you can skip it, and points are deducted.

I immediately found a strong sense of motivation to get through a round without having to skip a piece. However, having succeeded at that (and scored somewhere in the region of 240) I felt no urge whatever to try again and attempt to finish with a higher score.

I think I'm fundamentally far more motivated by the desire to achieve specific qualitative goals than I am by quantitative challenges such as scoring as much as possible on the way to those goals. I'll pay attention to score-maximising play if it has a material advantage to me (such as an extra life or power-up every N points) which might help me reach a qualitative goal, but otherwise I generally have very little interest in score compared to more ‘natural’ milestones: if one person reaches level N of a game, whereas another person dies on level N-1 but has a higher score, I will not consider there to be any particularly interesting way in which the latter has done better.

(And no, I can't generally persuade myself to see ‘complete this game with a score of at least <previous high score> + 1’ as a you-either-do-it-or-you-don't qualitative goal; I spot immediately that it's a quantitative goal wearing a qualitative hat and am not fooled.)

Comments

[simont]

I think it must be at least partly personality-dependent. I know people at work who are capable of spending a week or three finding an 0.25% speed increase in our compiler, and then spending the next week or three doing it again, and so on indefinitely. Over the years those 0.25%s really add up, so it's clearly worthwhile work, but I don't think I could do a job like that: I'm just not temperamentally suited to it, because of this non-motivating feeling I get when I think about gradual quantitative improvement. I'm much happier doing a job in which I get to write clear new functionality a lot of the time. But I don't think the 0.25% people are suicidally unhappy in their work, so they must be temperamentally better suited to it than me.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Indeed. Though I notice that, eg. Real Maths (TM), I feel *ought* to work the way way you want things to work (solve this problem or not), actually is somewhere between (someone solves parts of it, someone eventually pulls all the pieces together and I go kaching, and then people endlessly automate it, turning a 200 page original proof into a 1 page technique taught to undergrads :))