simont | Games and motivation

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.)

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Why is 'skipping zero peices' a qualitative goal, but 'achieving maxiumum score' a quantative one? Surely they're either both qualitative or both quantitative. Seems an awfully arbitrary distinction otherwise.

The story behind Tringo is cool -- it originated in the virtual world Second Life :)

I know what you mean. I tend to put it down to perfectionism -- I often like goals I can achieve, rather than ones I can sort of. So if I have a choice I prefer trying to gain a level, or get foo without losing any bars, to getting a high score.

And when both are available I feel (for no good reason) that a score should be a good representation of progress, and am annoyed if it happens to reward something other than what I want.

OTOH if no other goal is there, I can be quite interested in scoring at least 10^N.

For instance, here, I wanted to make as large a block as possible disappear at once. But it doesn't seem set up for anything more than 3.

I just spend 2 HOURS playing that and only got to 260 before I said, what the hell am I doing?

There are several clear differences to my eye. I'm not entirely sure which of them is the relevant one, but:

The true maximum score isn't known, so all I can ever say is that I've done better than I did last time. I'll never know if I've done as well as I can. By contrast, once I've skipped zero pieces, it's instantly clear that I'll never be able to skip any fewer. So one aspect of a qualitative goal is that you know whether you've achieved it or not. And what makes "score more than last time" a quantitative goal masquerading as a qualitative one is that as soon as you achieve it it gets replaced by an almost identical goal with a different number in it.
The difference between "non-zero" and "zero" is a much more conceptually fundamental difference than the difference between "lots" and "slightly more lots". If some skips were inevitable and I was just trying to get as few as possible, I think I'd see that as a quantitative goal, but getting none at all is somehow a more "natural" thing to want to know if you can do.
When I press the skip button, I'm pressing a button that says "I made an error", and I don't like having to admit that, so I'm motivated to try to avoid it. But when I just don't happen to score very many large blocks during the game, it's hard to point at a specific bit where I could have done better. Probably there was some point where a different arrangement of pieces would have scored more, but it didn't jump out at me at the time and make me think "oops", so it's less of an immediate blow to my pride and less of a motivation to go round again and try to do better.

am annoyed if it happens to reward something other than what I want

Yes. One of these days I want to invent a new scoring system for Tetris, because I'm sick and tired of the emphasis on clearing large blocks of lines at a time which virtually all existing scoring systems reward.

drswirly is particularly good at playing for tetrises (clearing four lines at a time using an I-piece): I've seen him play Tetris Worlds from level one and end up on level fourteen having scored about thirty-seven consecutive tetrises and cleared no line that wasn't part of a tetris, in spite of steadily increasing game speed. This is of course fearfully impressive (and I suspect even he couldn't have done it without the various planning-ahead features that TW supplies), but although I can admire the skill involved I don't feel motivated to try to emulate it, because the thing I really like about Tetris is something else entirely.

The playing style I describe above doesn't depend on lines actually disappearing when you fill them; it would work exactly the same way if all the pieces you dropped stayed there for ever and the well just stretched at the bottom so you still had some room to manoeuvre at the top. He's just packing a box with tetrominoes, and the line-clearing business is simply a means of stretching the box as he goes along. But what I find really elegant in Tetris is play which depends on the line-clearing semantics in a much more fundamental way, and which simply wouldn't work if you were just packing a box. For example:

Here, dropping the Z-piece at the position shown leaves an unfilled hole below it, but it's OK because the clearing of a line immediately uncovers that hole again, so in Tetris this is not an error move whereas it would be in pure box-packing. Even better would be if the I-piece on the right wasn't already there but was known to be the next piece to drop: you could put the Z where I've shown it and then drop the I down the right, deliberately introducing a hole but knowing you were certain to be able to remove it again immediately. This sort of thing is elegant and cunning and strikes me as "thinking outside the box" in a way which pure box-packing strategies aren't; it's this type of play which makes me feel I'm playing well, and it irks me that conventional scoring systems don't reward it at all (the line about to be cleared in the above picture is a single line and hence the lowest-scoring kind of thing).

Of course, it is hard to invent a scoring system which only rewards deliberate making-and-clearing of holes; all Tetris players are familiar with the experience of creating accidental holes during play and then having to fight their way back down towards them to clear up the mess. If I just rewarded the clearing of a hole, I'd be rewarding doofus play as well as my elegant style of play. Perhaps the emphasis ought to be on clearing holes promptly? So that the example I show above involves a hole being cleared in the same instant as it's created, or one piece later, so it would score lots; whereas if you left a hole at the bottom of the playing area by mistake and eventually fought your way back down to it 200 pieces later, its potential-score-value would have gradually decayed to the point where you barely noticed the bonus for uncovering the hole.

Try to get through the game without skipping any pieces *and* without forming any 2x2 blocks?

I've noticed in World of Warcraft that I much prefer the quests that are 'find this specific item in this specific place' to quests that are 'kill n of this type of monster' or 'find n of this kind of things that drop randomly from these types of monsters'. It's a similar thing I think.

I wonder if this is a general phenomonen that psychologists have a name for or if it's a personality-based thing.

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.

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 :))

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