Why People Play Video Games
Why We Play Video Games: How Our Desire For Games Shapes Our World was first published in Game Informer magazine and then on gameinformer.com by Ben Reeves
Gamers have spent countless hours saving princesses, dodging bullets, and dismembering Grecian monsters. What drives us to keep coming back to these experiences? Researchers worldwide have spent decades measuring games’ effects on our society: how they encourage or discourage violence, inspire creativity, or nurture laziness. However, people rarely ask why we play games in the first place. What drives us to collect coins, snipe aliens, or scale the walls of ancient tombs until three in the morning?
Psychologists and sociologists are only now beginning to understand why the human ability to play is so powerful. But unlocking the mystery behind this desire may do more than help us understand our obsession – it could reshape and improve society in powerful ways.
Mental Benefits
There are several mental benefits for childrens, adults, and seniors alike. Card games like Cribbage, Solitaire, and Spades enhance critical thinking, strategic planning, and decision-making skills in children by teaching pattern recognition, card combinations, and basic math concepts. Moreover, they are easy to play in person or online.
Card games are beneficial for adults as they promote cognitive engagement and relaxation that help contribute to mental stimulation and better well-being. For seniors, card games maintain mental acuity through mental agility, memory, and problem-solving, while also combating isolation. All groups benefit from stress relief and relaxation, as well as the overall positive impact on mental stimulation, skill development, social interaction, and leisure.
Three Invisible Needs
Gamers often use the term ‘escapism’ when discussing their hobby, but this is a hollow explanation for what motivates us to play games. In fact, the word ‘escape’ contains some negative implications – suggesting that those who play games need to break free from the mundane slavery of their reality. We enjoy retreats to other realities – ones more fantastical than our own – but we aren’t always driven to play games because we are trying to escape our lives. The real motivations for play are far more complex, and games positively fulfill several real-world human needs.
After earning his Ph.D. in clinical and social psychology from the University of Rochester, Scott Rigby helped found Immersyve, a research company designed to examine some of these basic human needs and discover what makes video games so appealing. After collecting several years’ worth of behavioral data and conducting numerous in-house studies from companies like Sony, Activision, and Warner Bros. Interactive, Rigby feels Immersyve has nailed down a few key motivations behind our addiction to fun.
“We all have basic psychological needs,” explains Rigby, who detailed gaming’s intrinsic allure in his book Glued to Games: How Videogames Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound. “These needs operate all the time – when we’re at work, or when we’re engaging in a softball league, or on weekends while we are -playing a video game. These needs are always operating. Games perfectly target several of these needs.”
According to Rigby, Immersyve’s complex needs-satisfaction metrics narrow down to three basic categories. The first of these needs is a need for competence – that is a desire to seek out control or to feel mastery over a situation. People like to feel successful, and we like to feel like we’re growing and progressing in our knowledge and accomplishments. This need plays out in real life when people switch careers or return to school because their current job isn’t rewarding or challenging enough. It’s also easy to see how video games make us feel more accomplished. Every time we level up in Final Fantasy or defeat a challenging boss in God of War, games fulfill our desire to feel competent.
Our second psychological need is autonomy: the desire to feel independent or have a certain amount of control over our actions. This need pervades nearly every facet of our culture. The drive toward autonomy is why people instinctively dislike being manipulated; it’s why imprisonment is a punishment, and we feel an innate urge to rebel against slavery. This need explains why game series that offer players a wealth of free choices – such as The Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto – are so popular.
“The terrible twos are a great example of the need for autonomy,” Rigby says. “It’s not terrible for the kid. It’s terrible for the parent who has to listen to their kid say ‘No’ all the time. What is that kid doing? The kid is showing their autonomy. They want to control their destiny, and they’re verbally flexing that muscle for the first time.”
The final psychological human need is relatedness. We like to feel like we matter to others and feel like we are making a significant contribution to society. In a 2003 study, the University of Massachusetts Medical School discovered that people with altruistic tendencies generally have higher levels of mental health and less overall life stress.
It’s easy to see how gamers can fulfill this need for relatedness by playing games with friends online. Still, oddly enough, Immersyve’s studies have found that this need for relatedness can be met even if gamers interact with people who are not real. “The way that games are written, this need can generally be met when players are talking to an in-game character,” Rigby says. “That’s why a lot of quests are often structured around helping a particular NPC find an item or collect a treasure.”
Over the centuries, we’ve gravitated towards experiences that make us feel more competent, autonomous, and related because these experiences make us feel good and mentally healthy. These needs can be fulfilled in many ways: through work, school, friends, sports, and hobbies. However, sociologists are beginning to understand that video games are one of the most seductive of all of these activities because they fulfill our psychological needs more efficiently than almost any other activity.
Games Are Work
Imagine this: A man sits at a desk and pulls up a numbers database. He looks through the database and compares a list of numbers from one column to a list from another column. He takes a certain number from one cell and reallocates it somewhere else. He clicks a few buttons, waits a few seconds, and then repeats the process. Then he does it again and again. This man could be performing spreadsheet accounting work, or he could be crafting in World of Warcraft.
At their most basic levels, work and play look a lot alike. The difference between the two is that games couch this kind of work in a fiction that makes them enjoyable. A game’s narrative makes our choices feel significant enough that we buy into the game emotionally, and the feedback system encourages us to keep working.
People often view games as the opposite of work, but some sociologists believe games are an idealized form of work. “Most people find work rewarding; we have built-in emotional reward centers that encourage us to complete tasks,” says Andrew Przybylski, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of Essex whose papers have appeared in journals like Psychological Science.
This built-in desire to feel accomplished often pushes sports stars to return to the game after retirement. People don’t like to be idle. Work meets our three invisible needs in some of the same ways that games do. Games are just more efficient satisfiers.
“The connection to how hard we work is often mismatched with the feedback we get from the real world,” Przybylski says. “Sometimes we think we really knocked it out of the park, and really you just phoned it in. Other times you might have burned the midnight oil, but no one seems to give a crap. One of the things that’s really powerful about video games is the level of connection between how hard you work and the feedback you receive for your behavior.”
Games are more consistent at rewarding us for our choices and provide a diversity of choice that the real world doesn’t provide. Gamers can go places and enter into situations that are closed off to them in real life. Games are immediately rewarding, providing instant feedback when we do something right, and telling us how well we perform every step along the way. These highly tuned feedback systems are the key to turning video games into an indispensable tool for bettering our future.
Students of the Game
It’s difficult to predict exactly how our society will unlock the power of games in the coming decades. Still, video games have already influenced science, education, and business. Examining how these disciplines have profited from gaming concepts could give us a glimpse of our future.
We’ve exploited one of gaming’s most useful applications for centuries. Chess was used in the Middle Ages to teach war strategies to noblemen. In the ‘70s, computer games like Oregon Trail did a better job of getting kids excited about American history than most history professors. Today, hundreds of web portals like Kidsknowit.com offer teachers a reservoir of tools to help educate students. Games are an indispensable learning tool, but we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of their teaching potential.
“Almost all educational games suck,” says Iowa State University professor Douglas A. Gentile, who has spent his career researching how video games affect children. “They don’t put nearly the same level of attention and resources into them as something like Halo.
I’d be surprised if they get 1/100th the resources Halo does. So much of the public debate about games has been sidetracked by tragedy. We wring our hands about the cause of violence in society, and there really is no one cause. Our ability to move forward with intelligent approaches to studying and discussing games really keeps getting sidetracked by media violence.”
Many modern – even violent – games might be better teaching tools than we realize. The Assassin’s Creed series allows gamers to explore classic locales sprinkled with real historical details. Rocksmith teaches people how to play guitar, and The Typing of the Dead improves horror fans’ typing skills. The upcoming indie title Code Hero even hopes to teach young programmers how to design games.
“I think games can provide a framework for understanding contemporary issues such as governmental budgets and spending,” Przybylski says. “I’d bet SimCity veterans have a less distorted views of current city/state/federal expenditures compared to the general public.”
Building blocks of a better world
While games help us learn about yesterday, they could also be a building block for a better tomorrow. Several businesses have taken the ‘sticky’ qualities that make video games engaging and applied them to traditionally mundane tasks.
Gamification is a buzzword often tossed around the conference tables of Fortune 500 companies. The concept promotes the idea of rewarding virtual currency to consumers who complete simple tasks. Foursquare users are familiar with the concept of gamification and its slow drip of new badges and awards. However, gamified services don’t meet our invisible needs on the same level as mainstream video games. Instead of razzle-dazzling customers with extrinsic baubles and badges, in the near future, businesses may fine-tune their feedback systems to tickle our psychological needs. Someday, filing accounting spreadsheets could be more like playing World of Warcraft. But games are already helping people get better at their jobs in many practical ways.
See The Difference Between Gamification And Game-Based Learning
“There are a number of great studies showing that first-person shooters increase our visual perception and help gamers pick information off of a screen quickly, which is the kind of skill that an air traffic controller needs, for example,” Gentile says. “A couple other studies with microscopic surgeons show that surgeons who have played games in the past are better at advanced surgical skills – that gaming is, in fact, a better predictor than how many years of training they’ve had or how many surgeries they’ve performed.”
Aside from the physical benefits of gaming, video games excel at setting clear goals and showing a player’s progression toward those goals. This approach already radiates across the social networking where progress bars litter sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Spotify. Other businesses have developed feedback mechanisms that allow customers to track their progress toward improved social, financial, and physical health. Unique puzzle games like Foldit and EteRNA encourage problem solvers to fold the structure of selected macromolecules differently, which will help further scientific learning and possibly cure diseases.
That they lower the barrier of entry for people to get behind new social causes is one of the reasons why people play video games. For example, the simple online quiz game Freerice has encouraged gamers to collect more than 90 billion grains of rice for the World Food Programme. Much like Twitter allows its users to interact with celebrities and businesses unlike any other medium in history, future game-like services and tools could encourage new social team building, allowing users to voice their opinions and affect societal change in myriad new ways.
No one believes that every facet of our lives would improve if it adhered to the rules of video games. Life can’t be all fun and games; sometimes, effort is needed to produce results. Some work is work. However, most industries and human endeavors may prosper if they do a better job meeting the psychological needs of their audience. No form of human expression understands needs satisfaction better than video games.
When used correctly, video games hold the potential to show us the world through a different set of lenses – to craft experiences that engage our minds both cognitively and socially, and ultimately make us feel like active participants in shaping our destiny.
Do we need a better reason to play games?
If you enjoyed this article, check out 50 of the Best Video Games for Learning.
This article originally appeared in issue 235 of Game Informer Magazine; Why People Play Video Games