Designing a game is hard, but some key considerations and principles can help ease the burden. When looking to build an educations, marketing or promotional game, there are other considerations added to the mix that add more challenges for designers. A game may have a purpose – educating the public, promoting a company, being an artistic statement or simply being a successful commercial product, but they also need to fulfill the audience’s needs to truly succeed. Marketing is often about looking at things from the customer’s perspective, but design can also take a more audience-based perspective too. In this article we’ll look at key motivations and forms of fun and joy that connect with people and motivate them to engage with a game. It isn’t that a game will provide all of these things, but by being aware of them we can consciously make decisions to provide for the audience.
Here we’re going to discuss the 12 Motivation Clusters model from Quantic Foundry (https://quanticfoundry.com/), a game analytics and market research company. This is by no means the only framework of player motivations, just what we’ll be looking at here. We’ll look at some other models in future articles. They each provide interesting insights, and the differences can be enlightening to see.
Typology – Factors vs Boxes
Quantic Foundry’s model is based on their assessment of players through in-game analytics and online profiling. They offer a personal assessment system that generates a report for an individual about their preferred styles of play, though I think this on both assessment and action fronts is prone to the typical failures of personality typing. As Carl Jung (the inventor of personality typing) feared, the greatest failure of personality typing is it being used as a categorization and systematizing force, rather than recognizing it as an snapshot assessment with temporal and perspective constraints. He felt that typing should be used merely as a tool for more holistic growth. The concept was meant as a leaping off point, not a box to fit in.
Humans should see themselves as capable of growth rather than aim to wallow in comfort. As designers we can and should both recognize habits and preferences, but to be recognized as an art and a positive force for humanity, we must also provide tools for growth of the psyche. Understanding motivation is an important conceptual underpinning for how we engage players and drive their learning and behaviour. So what are the motivations of play?
Achievement
The achievement motivational cluster includes two primary drivers – Completion and Power. This cluster is about players wanting to dominate the game – to complete it, achieving growth and power, to be seen as successful, powerful, the best. They seek reinforcement of their status and desire a sense of agency, importance, and growth. Completion is not just finishing the game, “winning” it, but also can be a matter of collecting sets, unlocking achievements, finishing side quests and missions, finding the secrets, possibly seeing different endings. Its about finishing things, unlocking them, collecting them.
The achievement system in Steam is an example of how even game platforms try to support and encourage using this motivation. Power is about what capabilities can be had in the game. They want to maximize statistics, collect the best armour, weapons, equipment, troops or resources. They want to dominate and know they’ve achieve strength and capability. This obviously lends itself to more competitive games, winning matches is a perfect confirmation of power, but stats can provide a sense of this in less fight/match organized games. Sports games can provide both, with player/team stats as well as match and tournament organization of play.
Action
The two primary drivers of play in the Action motivational cluster are Destruction and Excitement. This is a very visceral cluster based on sensation and impact. Players want things to happen, they seek sensory stimulation, they want to do things and have things happen. Think blockbuster action movies. Where are the car chases? The explosions? The fight scenes? Things should pop! The point of an interactive game is to be interactive, and these players want to make the most of that, in big, fast, flashy ways. Destruction is about seeing their impact on the world. It doesn’t have to always be destructive, but they want to see impact and change. Is the world adapting to their choices? Can they apply force and agency to change the world, make new options available?
Obviously, this has a big potential to cross-over with Achievement-Power play. Mario’s brick breaking is a great example, the player isn’t just breaking things, but that breaking can change access routes and affect the world and gameplay. Excitement is about spectacle and engagement. Get things animated and changing! This can also include a sense of consequence, importance and timing. Having to rush, to react, to make consequential decisions can also help push the excitement. A surprising amount of excitement can come from just the graphical and sound effects attached to a game. Add “juice” can hype up any type of gameplay, just look at the effects when a combo chain is achieved in a game like Bejeweled 2, even a casual turn-based puzzle game can have excitement! Excitement can have a lot of overlap with Discovery and Story motivations, with the newness of discovery or narrative consequences helping highlight excitement.
Creativity
Creativity is a motivation that speaks to a lot of game developers, but this internal design team motivation doesn’t necessarily transfer to their designs for player motivations. For players, this cluster represents both the desire to create themselves, and to explore, understand and appreciate the development teams design choices and creativity. This may seem like a no-brainer, that any experience of the game inherently shows its design and creativity, but the depth and artistry of creation can provide wildly different levels of satisfaction here. Innovative, artistic, clever design is key to satisfying this motivation cluster which is comprised of both Design and Discovery motivations.
Design is generally fulfilled by provide the player with the agency to create, design, or rearrange the world. Often this is done through crafting systems, customization options and most powerfully editors to make their own levels, worlds and challenges. Much like LEGO has captured the creative Design interest of kids for generations, Minecraft has tapped this digitally with the inclusion of all these major methods. The Discovery motivation is less about the player creating design and artistry, but appreciating the developers choices and creations. Games need to be well made, providing interesting, artistic, deep experiences that provide diversity, beauty, cleverness, and complexity to give a sense of inspiration, even revelation as the player explores the game world. This has a lot of overlap with the Fantasy and Story motivations of the Immersion cluster.
Immersion
In this motivational cluster players are looking to dive into a new world. Commonly used in the film industry immersion is the ability to get lost in the scenes, characters and stories of the created work. This cluster combined the motivations of Fantasy and Story. These are both used to create a sensory experience and emotional connection to the world. Fantasy is about being a different person, facing different scenarios, explore different societies and worlds. It’s about using imagination to its fullest to role play through alternatives to our mundane lives. Here the term “Fantasy” shouldn’t be confused with the “Fantasy” genre. The fantasy motivation crosses genres; roleplaying as another character, in another situation on another world is fantasy whether there’s dragons or magic involved or not.
Story is about a narrative, how characters and the world interact and unfold. The events, outcomes, social dynamics, intrigue, plot twists, back stories and lore that make the world come to life and have meaning. Story is the world not just coming to life, but the explanation of the world and situation the player finds their character in through backstory and lore, as well as how they can learn about the consequences and outcomes of their decisions throughout the game. Personal growth and social interactions between characters are a big part of conveying good story, though environmental storytelling can be highly effective if done right, though it tends to be a greater challenge.
Mastery
In the Mastery motivation cluster players are looking to understand the game and apply either skillful thinking or play to best the game or competition. They want to achieve great skill or understanding to make the best plays, or out plan/out manoeuvre opponents or problems. This group are most likely to practice, or grind (do tasks repetitively for some benefit), to improve their knowledge of and skill at the game. This includes the Challenge motivation which is about being presented with difficult play and overcoming it through skill or strategy. Game balance is always a challenge for a designer, but these types of players will push for higher difficulties as a way to test their skills and have them engage with the game and improve themselves (at least in terms of game-related ability). Thankfully this means these kinds of players are much less worried about failure and more likely retry things.
The other motivation in this cluster is Strategy. This is a classic play dynamic, famous from traditional games like Chess. It’s about understanding the rules, potentials, and situation and being able to predict and plan for future outcomes. This is a deeply analytic take on play that aligns strongly with introversion and intellectual pursuits. Studying and analysis is a fundamental part of this play style, with desire for knowledge a prime driver that allows the player to better theorize and prognosticate.
Socializing
The final Motivational cluster is the Socializing cluster. These motivations are aligned to interaction with other players. This makes it hard to address for single player games, but not impossible. Online leaderboards, shared content and talking about the game, especially in games with deep customization, strategy or storyline can all provide social dynamics in even single player games. Players with this motivation are interested in how the game can help them interact with others. The first motivation is Community. This is about how people can connect through the game. Can they play together, support each other, message each other? Is there a way they can they create culture and practices? Can they share ideas and expression with each other? These players are looking to interact with other people and share thoughts and feelings, to feel a sense of social connection and support.
In a very different take some social motivation is Competition. These players want to compete with others, to play games and to challenge themselves and others. To see who is best, to spur each other on, to challenge each other, to learn from or show off to others. Very similar to the Power motivation, stats, scores and wins are a primary metric of meaning, but it is inherently taken to a social angle where comparisons can be made between people and not just benchmarks, often through direct versus dynamics.
The Bottom Line
While typology is often too simplistic a view of human nature this system is a useful point of reflection for designers. The examples may be too stark and narrowly defined to showcase the complexity of intersectional interest and valuation, but they provide iconic archetypes to consider when designing games. Designers should think about all of these varying motivations and how they play a role in their designs. No game will satisfy all players, but we can think about what we do offer and to who. There is no “correct” choice, just a chance to reflect and consider. Is it better to have some mechanics to cater to each, or is it better to focus on a perfect one type? With 8 billion possible players on earth, it’s impossible to say, but some mixture between the two extremes is probably the right answer, which means knowing and considering all the types is important.