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

[christhomas123.livejournal.com]

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.

[satanicsocks.livejournal.com]

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

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

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.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

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

[mooism.livejournal.com]

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

[jvvw.livejournal.com]

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.