Games and motivation [entries|reading|network|archive]
simont

[ userinfo | dreamwidth userinfo ]
[ archive | journal archive ]

Sun 2006-05-28 23:29
Games and motivation
LinkReply
[personal profile] simontMon 2006-05-29 08:10
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.
Link Reply to this | Parent
navigation
[ go | Previous Entry | Next Entry ]
[ add | to Memories ]