Motivations For Playing MMORPGs

[Jonathan]

Motivations For Playing

Understanding MMORPG players is fundamentally about understanding why they are playing the game. While Bartle's Types are well-known, the model's lack of empirical grounding is a significant weakness. For example, Bartle postulates two axes and four resulting player types (8 altogether in his newer model), but unfortunately, it is not clear that reality divides up neatly, simply just because we postulate that it does. Thus, while it seems intuitive that members of raid-oriented guilds are both Achievers and Socializers (as opposed to Achievers who are loners and avoid belonging to guilds), these two types are on opposite quadrants in Bartle's model. And if the axes denote different modes of relating to the game environment, then it is not clear how this could be possible, or whether these axes are indeed meaningful.

A resulting problem is that a reliable assessment tool cannot exist without a reliable model of player types, and without reliable ways of understanding who is a Socializer and who is not a Socializer, a model doesn't offer much guidance. For example, Socializers are proposed to enjoy role-playing and chatting. But what if these two components are not actually correlated? In other words, Bartle's Test (not created by Bartle) might simply be creating the appearance of types instead of measuring them because the test bases categories on false dichotomies and associations.

In fact, Bartle's sub-division of the existing types into 8 types merely exposes the weakness of this paradigm of categorizing players. There is no reason why people would fall naturally into 4, 8 or even 16 buckets, and there is no reason why someone should be excluded from the Achiever bucket just because they fall into the Socializer bucket. After all, just because someone likes to play the piano doesn't automatically mean they don't like water polo. Instead, it makes more sense that a player could score high or low on some set of primary motivations, and that their score on any one motivation doesn't constrain their other scores in any way. This is the paradigm that the following work is based on.

Instead of starting with an a priori framework, several survey phases were focused on developing an empirical model of player motivations. A list of possible reasons players might be motivated was generated based on existing models, such as Bartle's Types, or anecdotal information from previous surveys. Example statements included:

1) How much do you enjoy helping other players?
2) How often do you make up stories and histories for your characters?
3) How important is it to you to level up your character as fast as possible?
4) How much do you enjoy competing with other players?

Respondents then indicated their answer to each of these statements on a construct-specific 5-point scale2. A factor analysis3 was then performed on this data to separate the statements into clusters where items within each cluster were as highly correlated as possible while clusters themselves were as uncorrelated as possible. This methodology achieved three goals:

1) Ensured that components of each motivation were indeed related.
2) Ensured that different motivations were indeed different.
3) Provided a way to assess these motivations.

The factor analysis produced 6 factors (clusters of statements). All the factors have a reliability of above .70 - the threshold commonly used in psychometric assessments.

Achievement (Reliability = .78)
How important is it to you to level up your character as fast as possible?
How important is it to you to acquire rare items that most players will never have?
How important is it to you to become powerful?
How important is it to you to accumulate resources, items or money?

Casual Socializer / Chat (Reliability = .78)
How much do you enjoy helping other players?
How much do you enjoy getting to know other players?
How much do you enjoy chatting with other players?
How much do you enjoy being part of a friendly, casual guild?
How often do you find yourself having meaningful conversations with other players?

Immersion / Role-Playing (Reliability = .75)
How important is it to you to be immersed in a fantasy world?
How much do you enjoy trying out new roles and personalities with your characters?
How often do you make up stories and histories for your characters?
How often do you role-play your character?

Serious Socializer / Relationship (Reliability = .79)
How often do you find yourself having meaningful conversations with other players?
How often do you talk to your online friends about your personal issues?
How often have your online friends offered you support when you had a real life problem?

Competition / Grief (Reliability = .75)
How much do you enjoy competing with other players?
How much do you enjoy dominating/killing other players?
How much do you enjoy doing things to make other players angry?
How often do you purposefully try to annoy other players?

Escapism (Reliability = .72)
How important is it to you that the game allows you to escape from the real world?
How often do you play so you can avoid thinking about some of your real-life problems or worries?

Several differences that emerged in contrast with Bartle's Types are worth mentioning. First of all, role-playing was found to not correlate highly with chatting or relationship formation and appeared to be a motivation on its own. Secondly, an Explorer motivation did not emerge. The following statements were potential candidates for an Explorer motivation:

Explorer (Reliability = .38)
Knowing as much about the game mechanics and rules as possible.
Exploring every map or zone in the world.
Having a self-sufficient character.

Earlier attempts had also included these statements:
- I like to think about class-balancing issues.
- I try out a lot of things to experiment with the game mechanics.
- I try to find bugs I can exploit.
- What fascinates me is finding out how stuff works in the game.
- I like numbers, charts and tables.

None of these statements were found to be highly correlated, however, the Achievement factor is correlated with the "mechanics" statement (r = .46) and the "self-sufficiency" statement (r = .29). So perhaps the motivation to Explore is a means to Achievement instead of being a motivation in its own right. Thus, perhaps all Explorers are in fact Achievers, or a motivation unique to game developers who have an external reason to understand a game's mechanics.

Well, fine, go ahead and bring science into it.

[Peijen]

it's all about maximizing profits, of course we have to bring science into it

[Peijen]

on the subject of money, i have come to the conclusion subscription based software is the best business model out there (either the software itself or services that goes with it). The start up cost is high, but the income is consistant and you can easily measure how your next release is going to perform, i.e. how would your user base change with new feature x/y/z. subscription also allow you to use the continuous project model which is all the rave lately.

and mmorpg should be sold on content not technology, and open source the game engine would be a good idea. i am not sure if i made a previous post about this or not but i look around and one french company has already used this model.

actually they have taken it one step further. the two co-founder start the company that developed the game and game engine and open sourced the engine. they then quit when the project is mostly complete, start their own new companies and build new games on the engine they just created. brilliant strategy if you ask me, let the investor pay for the start up cost and benefit from it with minimum lost/risk. of course i don't think the investor realize what they have done yet.

[Jonathan]

I propose a new classification system based on this research. It shall be modeled after the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test. The Yuen-Pearce Type Indicator MMORPG player test shall consist of a survey of questions. As a result of answering these questions appropriately, the MMORPG player is evaluated along the following axes:

Achieving - Slacking
Chatting - Ignoring
Role-playing - L33t-speaking
Dating - Wanking
Killing - Helping
Escaping - Dealing

The test provides the MMORPG player with a list of his or her preferences and the relative importance of each.

[Jason]

This was on one of sharad's friend's message board. Kind of related.

[Jonathan]

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/gateway_intro.html

This is a extensive survey and analysis of MMORPG players.

http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archive ... hp?page=10 - Same analysis as Yuen, slightly different outcome

[Dave]

its like the wheel of time! where are the links to EQ widows?