Through the Looking Glass

In a recent survey, I asked players whether they had ever learned anything about themselves from their MMO experiences, or whether their experiences in an MMO had ever changed how they thought about themselves or their perspective of the world. About 400 MMO players responded to this particular question, revealing some interesting perspectives on what they have learned from their experiences in an MMO.

MMOs are interesting social spaces in several ways. First of all, there are almost no other social spaces in the physical world where people from such different demographic backgrounds and life experiences collaborate on a regular basis. The age range in most MMOs goes from 10 to 70. In a typical 5-person pick-up group, you may have a high-school student, a war veteran, a professional home-maker, a law professor, and a retired bank manager. In our education and work systems, we typically only get to talk and work with people who are incredibly similar to ourselves. This is actually seldom the case in MMOs. Another thing that bears pointing out that there are almost no social spaces in the physical world where teenagers routinely get to work with adults as equals. But not only does collaboration occur, teenagers routinely lead groups of adults, give them orders, and partly schedule their leisure time in MMOs. Learning how to work with and lead a diverse group of people is an important social skill, especially for teenagers.

Beyond the demographic landscape, MMOs also expose us to stressful group conflicts, leadership opportunities, and moral dilemmas, among other scenarios, that we may be less often exposed to in our day to day lives. Another interesting part of MMOs is the compressed time in several domains. While it may take decades to rise to the top of your profession in the real world, it is possible to reach max-level in some MMOs with just several months of casual playing. The rate at which guilds form, fragment, and dissolve may also allow some players to try out and understand how to lead and manage teams in ways that may take much much longer in an actual office. In short, MMOs may offer players experiences in roles and positions that they may not have access to in the physical world.

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Leadership and Management

Of all the things that players mentioned, one came up over and over again. Of the 400 responses, and this includes players who said “no, didn’t learn anything”, about 44 specifically described how they had become better leaders or team managers from their MMO experiences. Many of these players also specifically mentioned how this has helped them tangibly in their work lives, in terms of promotions or better pay-scales.

The following responses are insightful because several players articulate the specific skills that they have become better at from their MMO experiences. Another important thing to note is that these responses aren’t only coming from teenagers who have few leadership and management experiences from real life. Players from all over the age range noted this change. And finally, I want to point out that no examples were given in the original phrasing of the question. In other words, this isn’t a case of respondents flocking to examples in the question stem.

In addition to high-level leadership and management, a related skill that several players brought up was learning how to work with and understand other people in team scenarios.

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Gaining Confidence

Another theme that some players brought up was that their in-game interactions allowed them to work through some shyness issues they’ve had in face-to-face interactions. What is most striking in this first anecdote is that the MMO space removed barriers to self-growth present in this person’s day-to-day life at school.

Of course, shyness is an issue that many people struggle with, and isn’t a problem only teenagers have to work through.

One of the processes that drive these increases in confidence, and hinted at by some of the narratives above, is that trying out more confident and sociable identities in an MMO allows them to experience what they didn’t think they were capable of. This in turn encourages them to extend their new behavioral repertoire outside of the virtual setting. The following players make this point more explicitly.

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Personal Growth

Apart from these two broad classes of skills that people mentioned, some players described stumbling-blocks in their personalities that their game experiences allowed them to move past. These are probably more accurately described as personal growth. This first anecdote is a good example.

Another kind of growth that several players mentioned was learning how to stay calm and not be bothered by the small stuff in life.

These final two examples are interesting in that they show more clearly how an MMO can reveal an area for potential growth and facilitate that transition.

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Revealing Aspects of the Self

Of course, it isn’t the case that MMOs can solve everyone’s personal stumbling-blocks. Indeed, many players noted that their MMO experiences helped reveal negative parts of themselves that they didn’t really know about. Since awareness is necessary before change, I guess we could think of these as precursors to personal growth. For example, some players noted that they never realized how competitive they are.

Others noticed how much they cared about other people’s approval and their need for validation.

And finally, for others, the game revealed a dark side of themselves that worried them.

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Global Perspective

One final category of comments that players made involved how their MMO experience helped broaden their perspective of the world. For some, interactions with players from different countries provided a more sober perspective of the US.

But overall, players commented on how their experiences helped them see the world from a more global, connected perspective.

Ending Thoughts

I think these narratives are helpful in highlighting the porous boundary between virtual worlds and physical worlds. As many of these stories show, it just isn’t fair to talk about MMOs as fantasy worlds that are somehow cut off from reality, nor is it fair to claim that MMOs only produce negative consequences. What happens in MMOs can lead to self-growth as well as promotions at work. Of course, this isn’t to say that everyone who plays MMOs will derive positive consequences from it, but these narratives do hint at the fuller spectrum of what MMOs are and the interesting ways that virtual worlds cross over and tie into who we are and what we do in the physical world.

Superstitions

I made a short, speculative post on MMO superstitions on the Terra Nova blog a while back when I first began to think about the idea. This article is a more elaborate exploration drawing on a survey asking players to describe superstitions they have seen in an MMO. But I want to begin with the most interesting comment made on the Terra Nova blog post which was posted by Heather Sinclair, a member of the Dungeon and Dragons Online development team:

B.F. Skinner is well-known for his theory of behavioral conditioning, but one of his quirkiest studies involved inducing superstition in pigeons (1948). 8 pigeons were placed in a reinforcement contraption (i.e., Skinner Box) and were given a food pellet every 15 seconds no matter what they did. After several days, each pigeon had fixated on a particular superstitious behavior. One pigeon danced counter-clockwise, another two developed a left-to-right head-swinging motion, another attacked an invisible object in the top right corner of the cage, and so forth. This phenomenon has also been replicated among high-school students (Bruner & Revuski, 1961). And given that MMOs are a kind of Skinner Box that offer some random rewards (e.g., rare drops), it's not surprising that superstitious behaviors emerge in MMOs as well.

I want to make clear that I am using the word “superstition” in the context of MMOs without reference to spirits or religion in the way “superstitious” sometimes implies when used in everyday language. Specifically, I’m using the word “superstition” to refer to repeated behaviors driven by strong beliefs that doing X (or not doing X) will cause Y even though there is no good evidence that this is the case, or despite countering evidence. Superstition falls along a spectrum of related phenomena, such as urban legends and speculation. What differentiates superstition from these other two terms is that urban legends are typically stories which have no repeated behavioral component and speculation usually forms the basis for somewhat systematic testing. Of course, the distinctions among all these terms are not clear cut.

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In this particular survey, about 380 MMO players described one or more superstitions they had seen in an MMO. As I read through the player-submitted superstitions, I was struck by several things, and I will list some of these here to help frame the phenomena we’re looking at and the stories that follow:

1) Other people’s superstitions always seem crazier. When reading through the superstitions, I felt more sympathetic towards ones in games I’ve played and more likely to laugh at superstitions in games I haven’t played. But, of course, most of the superstitions are incredibly similar across games and I think reading superstitions from other games will help us think more seriously about the ones in the games we do play.

2) Some people argue that all MMO superstitions must be false because it’s just easier for developers to use a random number generator throughout, but it’s also true that it takes just several lines of code to increase the chances of all rare drops on Tuesdays. And while it is impossible to prove that gods or spirits exist in the real world, there actually is an omnipotent, omniscient god in MMOs (known as the game developer) who can and does mess with the rules. In other words, there is no logical reason why a four-leaf clover would bring you good luck in real life, but this is plausible and easy to implement in an MMO. So ironically, there is a better basis in believing in an MMO superstition than a real life superstition.

3) A corollary of #2 is that we may never know whether a particular superstition is actually true or false because: a) most of the scenarios occur with sufficiently low frequencies (i.e., rare mob drops) that they are hard to sample for testing, b) we will never have access to the actual code base in most cases, and c) even if we did, weird features do arise from complex code that developers never put in explicitly but nevertheless might exist (e.g., the case of the "wi flag" in Asheron's Call). However, while some of these superstitions may be true, it is likely that most of them are in fact false.

But enough of my thoughts. Let’s turn to the superstitions that players have seen in the games they play.

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Instance Seeding

Most superstitions players described involved low-chance or high-risk events. For example, a low-chance event may be a rare loot drop. In World of Warcraft, there is a pervasive superstition that the loot table in high-level instances is determined by the first member of the group who steps foot inside the instance.

While a superstition involving a common scenario may be easily disproved by testing, one reason why superstitions involving uncommon scenarios sustain themselves is because “it can’t hurt” to try it. And if you only get to run a high-level instance once each week, then why not try something out that only takes 30 seconds?

Some People Are Luckier

One interesting variation of the instance seeder superstition claims that certain characters are luckier or have better loot tables.

What fascinates me here is that certain characters come to be seen as being inherently lucky or unlucky (even divine or cursed), analogous to how certain people in life are sometimes perceived to have divine or miraculous powers.

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Lucky Charms

There is also a pervasive item-based superstition regarding drop rates across many MMOs and this is the belief that having certain objects in your inventory will improve the drop rate of rare items. The specific item changes from game to game, but takes the same general form.

And again, here we see the interesting behavior where players may not themselves “believe” in the superstition, but they do it anyways because the behavior requires little effort in comparison with the potential gains.

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Over-Enchanting

An interesting case study of a high-risk event is something known as over-enchanting, a crafting mechanic present in games such as Ragnarok Online, Ultima Online, and Lineage 2.

In addition to standing in specific places, players described a wide variety of other superstitions related to over-enchanting. Some of these involve eating before enchanting.

Others have developed a more elaborate set of rituals.

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Crafting in FFXI

The most interesting superstitions related to crafting actually come from Final Fantasy XI, and it’s because the developers have a history of messing with the players.

Deliberately strange rules like this have spawned an entire legion of crafting superstitions in FFXI.

As a side note, I’ve never felt so relieved to not be playing an MMO where moonphases are involved. Just imagine the beliefs that might spring up in WoW if that were the case.

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Spawning

Spawning as a game mechanic used to be a much bigger deal, such as in the original EverQuest. This is because some mobs would have spawn times of an hour or six hours in addition to having place-holder spawns. This helps to partly explain why there were many superstitions regarding spawning in EQ in a way that there aren’t in a game like WoW where spawning is faster and less painful. One prevalent superstition was the existence of an “anti-spawn” radius.

Other superstitions involved cleaning up after yourself.

And of course, some people developed ritual dances for spawning. As you’re reading these, please note the uncanny resemblance of this to Skinner’s pigeons.

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Loaded Dice

Given the prevalence of random rolling systems in many MMOs, it makes sense that players might develop superstitions on what is ostensibly a random number generator. Of course, badly-implemented random number generators (or overly imaginative players) often give the impression of having patterns. One of the most popular superstitions is that you can get rid of your “bad rolls”.

A variant of this is waiting till someone else makes a bad roll and then rolling yourself.

Others prefer an order-based method of rolling.

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Risks, Costs, and Persistence of Superstitions

It bears pointing out the conditions that encourage superstitions to develop and the irrational and social mechanisms that sustain them. As we’ve seen, superstitions are more likely to involve low-chance and high-risk events. In practice, they are partly sustained because the cost of a 30 second superstitious behavior is extremely low in comparison with a raid wipe (and the consequent regrouping time).

Another mechanism is that we tend to remember confirming cases more than disconfirming cases. But typically, one confirming case is enough to create a new group of converts.

Overall, I was most surprised by how widespread superstitions were across MMOs and how adamantly some players follow them. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, a few of these superstitions might in fact be true, but most are likely to be false. I’ll close this exploration of superstitions with an anecdote that is a little more light-hearted.

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Appendix

There were a bunch of interesting submitted superstitions that didn’t neatly fit into the narrative flow of the article, but I wanted to make sure that they were shared as well. Here they are.

Bovine Assault

A Special, Happy Place

Paint Brush of Souls

A New Disorder is Born

I want to start off by saying that it is clear that sometimes gamers play too much and their game playing impacts their work and relationships in negative ways. There are many many anecdotes by friends and family of gamers as well as gamers themselves who describe how extreme game-playing can become. On the other hand, making this observation in no way necessitates creating a new psychological disorder with which to stigmatize games and gamers. It is this distinction and the gap between those two notions that I want to explore in this article.

A New Disorder is Born

The American Psychiatry Association does not officially recognize Internet Addiction Disorder (even though that term has appeared in academic papers quite often recently). There are several reasons why. The foundational work behind the concept of Internet Addiction Disorder derives from survey studies using a set of criteria developed by Kimberley Young (1996).

1. Do you feel preoccupied with the Internet (think about previous on-line activity or anticipate next on-line session)?
2. Do you feel the need to use the Internet with increasing amounts of time in order to achieve satisfaction?
3. Have you repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back, or stop Internet use?
4. Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use?
5. Do you stay on-line longer than originally intended?
6. Have you jeopardized or risked the loss of significant relationship, job, educational or career opportunity because of the Internet?
7. Have you lied to family members, therapist, or others to conceal the extent of involvement with the Internet?
8. Do you use the Internet as a way of escaping from problems or of relieving a dysphoric mood (e.g., feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression)?

A person who answers “yes” to five or more of the above questions is considered to have Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD). Thus, in the original survey work, it was found that some people fell into this criteria and thus a new disorder was born. The primary objection to this methodology of creating psychological disorders is that for any given media form, hobby, or activity, it is probably true that some percentage of people will fall into this criteria of “addiction”. The only difference is that researchers choose only certain activities to investigate for addiction disorders. And thus, we have IAD and we are asked to believe that people never watch TV too much, never play golf too much, and never work too much. The Internet is dangerous whereas other activities are wholesome and good. But if any and every activity can have its very own addiction disorder, it’s not clear that such a notion is meaningful. On the other hand, picking and choosing which activities we deem “addictive” seems more and more arbitrary.

Another problem is that it conflates all kinds of things that people do online. In this model, shopping online, chatting online, looking for information online, and playing games online are all the same thing. It were as if any normal activity suddenly becomes potentially deviant and dangerous when it happens online. And by fudging the important differences among those activities in terms of motivations and social interactions, these survey studies typically manage to sidestep the most important question of all - what causes people to become addicted to the Internet to begin with? What is it about the Internet that is so dangerous?

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Call It What It Is

Young has proposed a model for IAD known as the ACE model - Accessibility, Control, and Excitement. She argues that these three aspects of Internet use encourage addictions. One problem is that most forms of media have ACE components. For example, TVs are accessible, remotes give us a great deal of control, and there’s plenty of sex, gore, and action on TV. The same is true of non-media activities such as rock climbing or golf. Now it is true that living close to a golf course increases accessibility and thus the likelihood of developing an intense interest in golf, but using that as an argument for creating an addiction disorder for golf seems strange. It is equally strange when it is done for the IAD.

More importantly, the ACE model leaves out one very important fact. Not everyone gets “addicted”. In fact, I know many first-person shooter gamers who find MMORPGs to be the most boring games in the world (and vice versa). If IAD were solely caused by aspects of the technology, then either everyone or no one would get addicted. In other words, whatever is causing IAD has to involve something more than just pointing fingers at the technology itself. It’s got to have something to do with the individual as well.

The emphasis on the media creates the illusion that the blame belongs to the media itself. It portrays the Internet as a predator that every person can fall prey to. But the more we look, the less this seems to be the case. Being addicted to one thing makes you more likely to be addicted to other things. People who are depressed are more likely to spend too much time online. People who are diagnosed as online gaming addicts typically have other problems - such as depression or low self-esteem. Recent studies show that one out of ten teenagers is depressed. The overall picture is quite clear, internet addiction may just be an expression of other well-understood problems such as depression. In other words, it may have more to do with the people than it does with the technology.

For a long time, we've known that people who are severely depressed may do harmful things to themselves, but whether we create a whole new set of "addictions" to explain it (and shift the blame from the person to the technology) or whether we call it as it is - depression, low self-esteem, etc. - is very much a social decision that is tied to the paranoia and mindset of the world we live in. If IAD were really about the person rather than the technology, then taking away the technology alone won’t solve the problem. And if the technology isn’t really the problem, then why create a disorder that stigmatizes a technology and its users?

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The 7 o’clock News

If someone dies while watching TV, that is not newsworthy. If someone dies on a golf course, you can bet that you won’t see it on the 7 o’clock news. But every time someone dies when they’re playing online games, it will be all over the news. We treat the Internet and online gaming as if no other media forms or leisure activities exist. On average, people watch 25-30 hours of TV a week, yet we seldom question whether people watch too much TV these days. But is that because TV has become a socially acceptable “addiction” that everyone is guilty of?

In a more recent paper, Young devotes several pages to the online affair as a common dangerous consequence of internet “addiction" (2004 - need academic access). It were as if affairs are somehow one of the defining reasons why the Internet is dangerous. But it is clear that affairs happen in the real world too. People have affairs at work, while playing golf, and while shopping at the mall. Young states that “at an alarming rate, once long-term and stable marriages are destroyed by a cyberaffair”. I would like to point out that long-term and stable marriages are destroyed by affairs, period. Just because they are more likely to occur now over the internet rather than over the phone or over written letters is simply a shift in communication modality. Besides, do we really know how many marriages are ruined by affairs carried out via traditional means (telephone, mail, water coolers at work, the gym, etc.)? Do we know whether people are simply having more affairs regardless of communication modality? To argue that the internet is to blame for cyberaffairs is akin to blaming kleptomania on shopping malls.

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Fun

Do spouses of golfers never feel estranged from their loved ones leaving them to go to a golf course every weekend? Do they never worry that a romantic affair may spark on the golf course? Do they never complain that their romantic partner plays too much golf? Or what about the investment banker who grinds 60-80 hour weeks and has no time to be with their family? Why do we stigmatize and pathologize certain activities when other similar activities are unquestioned?

Society is in the habit of legislating what we should and should not have fun doing, even when it comes to love and the bedroom. Not so long ago, homosexuality was diagnosed as a pathology. And sodomy laws were and are an attempt to criminalize sex among men. The variation in what constitutes wholesome enjoyment across cultures shows that certain kinds of fun can be deemed pathological, but that these decisions are inherently tied to the local culture and belief system. Labeling certain activities as addictive and potentially pathological is society’s way of marking what it deems to be unacceptable forms of fun.

We live in strange times. Watching TV for almost 30 hours a week in passive lethargy next to family members who barely talk to each other is considered to be socially acceptable. But if you play an interactive game instead of just watch a passive display for that same amount of time, and if you actually talk with people around the world instead of ignoring the people around you, then you may have the chance of developing a psychological disorder. It is ironic that apathy and laziness will never be questioned as psychological disorders, but a bit of passion can get you in deep trouble. Personally, I think apathy and laziness are far bigger problems.

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Ending Note

People can develop dependencies on many substances and activities. Creating new psychological disorders for every substance and activity seems like overkill if behavioral dependencies are more tied to the person rather than the specific activity that the dependency tethers to. And singling out only a few activities as potentially addictive seems disingenuous and arbitrary. Indeed, why do we not just have a general diagnosis called “behavioral dependency” rather than picking and choosing which behaviors are addictive? Language shapes how we think about technology use as well as our role as technology users. The notion that "video games are addictive" frames us as the helpless victims, whereas the notion of “developing a dependency” frames the excessive behavior as a function of the individual’s state of mind.

By calling it “online gaming addiction”, the media encourages us to think that we’re dealing with a very new problem. But if behavioral dependency is a general problem that tethers to many different kinds of activities, then “online gaming addiction” is actually a very well-understood problem because clinicians have treated depression and anxiety for a long time. If people can develop behavioral dependencies on any activity, then why are we surprised that some people develop dependencies on online games? Why is it news? I contend it is mostly because we’ve always used the word “addiction” to mark out deviant social activities in a way that treats them as unique predators, as emergent problems which we’ve never seen before. But once we shift our framework to one of general behavioral dependencies, then we have to abandon this view. What we’re seeing is actually a very old problem.

See Also (more recent articles listed first):

- The Trouble with "Addiction"
- A Q&A with a Therapist
- Problematic Usage
- The Seduction of Achievement
- Addiction
- Understanding MMORPG Addiction

Problematic Usage

There are several reasons why I prefer not to use the word “addiction”. One reason is that the word has gained a lot of baggage. It’s flung around by sensationalist media to portray MMOs in a particular light. But it’s also used casually by gamers as a way of saying how good a game is. Another reason is that as soon as we use the word addiction, some people will argue that addiction can only occur where there is a physical substance causing a physiological response of dependence and withdrawal. Using the word addiction mires us in a debate of reconciling physical addiction theories with non-physical addiction theories.

In other words, people constantly debate whether someone can be addicted to video games, but in the same way that no one will argue that some people eat unhealthy, no one will argue that some people spend too much time playing video games. And of course, this isn’t a notion of a threshold of hours played just as some people can eat as much as they want and never gain weight. It’s about how your time spent playing video games impacts the rest of your life. Some people - like college students on vacation or retirees - have all the time in the world to play. Their game-play largely doesn’t impact their real life obligations or relationships. Problematic usage is more about how your game-play begins to negatively impact your obligations and responsibilities.

And while there’s a lot of work that deals with defining and trying to measure this problematic usage, there isn’t very much work on explaining what it is about video games and the people who play them that leads to problematic usage. After all, it doesn’t happen to everyone. In fact, I know a lot of people in real life who think MMORPGs are the most boring video games out there. And that means that whatever is causing problematic usage can’t be entirely about these games. Because if that were the case, then either everyone or no one would exhibit problematic usage. In other words, it’s got to be something about the people playing them as well.

There’s another stumbling block when people talk about online gaming addiction. It makes it easy to believe that there’s just one kind of addiction - that there’s a certain way that causes it to happen and that once it happens all the addicts are alike. And that you can avoid addiction if you follow these steps, or that you can resolve your addiction by following these guidelines. This is part of the problem with using the framework of physical addiction because physical addictions have well-known physical causes. It encourages us to think and talk about video games “addiction” in a certain way. But given the variation in why people play MMORPGs, it’s not clear at all that there’s just one underlying reason for problematic usage.

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The survey data presented here sheds light on these two questions: 1) What about MMORPGs and their players lead to problematic usage? and 2) Is there a dominant pathway to problematic usage? And I have another trick up my sleeve. I can answer these two questions without ever having to categorize players as problematic users or not. Here’s what I did. I drew from existing measures of online problematic usage that centered on dependence, withdrawal and negative impact on real life obligations and relationships. The survey items used were:

• Do you spend more time than you think you should playing the game?
• How difficult would it be for you to limit your playing time?
• How agitated do you get if the servers go down unexpectedly?
• How often do your friends or family members complain about your game play behavior?
• Has your work/school performance suffered because of your game play?
• How much of your happiness in life currently is derived from playing the game?
• Have your personal relationships suffered because of your game-play?

A factor analysis showed that all these items loaded onto a single factor implying that they are measuring the same underlying construct. A problematic usage score was calculated for every respondent based on a weighted sum of their responses to the items. I then ran a multiple regression with the motivation components, gender, age and hours played per week as the predictors. The multiple regression was significant at p < .001 with an adjusted R-square of .33 (a good model with strong predictors). The best predictor of problematic usage was the escapism subcomponent (Beta = .31, p < .001), followed by hours played per week (Beta = .27, p < .001) and then the advancement subcomponent (Beta = .18, p < .001).

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In other words, the people who are most likely to exhibit problematic usage are those who are purposefully using the online environment to escape their real life problems. They are playing to avoid thinking about their real life concerns. Another set of people who are likely to exhibit problematic usage are those who are driven to advance and achieve within the game. They are hooked on the rewards cycle, accumulating resources, currency and rare items. We know that these are not the same group of people because the two motivations are largely uncorrelated (r = .13).

With regards to the two questions we had, the data suggests that there are two pathways that are highly correlated with problematic usage - escapism and achievement. The escapism component is more about the mindset of the people playing, while the achievement component is both about the goal-driven nature of the player as well as the rewards mechanisms provided by the game. In either case, the data suggests that models of problematic usage need to consider both internal and external factors, but also that they need to take account of the different reasons players exhibit problematic usage. There is no single thing about MMORPGs that causes problematic usage and knowing this helps us develop different ways to help people who are exhibiting problematic usage.

Gender and age differences were also analyzed. Male players were significantly more likely to exhibit problematic usage than female players. Players between the ages of 18-22 are the ones most likely to exhibit problematic usage.

See Also (listed in chronological order):

- Understanding MMORPG Addiction
- Addiction
- The Seduction of Achievement
- A New Disorder is Born

In Their Own Words: The Immersion Component

Over the past 5 years, I have asked MMORPG players hundreds of different questions. The one that inevitably provides the most interesting responses is this one - “Why do you play?”. The following narratives show how multi-faceted every player is and how motivations intersect and influence each other. Together, these narratives provide the foundation to any other discourse about MMORPGs. After all, if we don’t understand why players are in these online worlds to begin with, then we can never truly appreciate the more complex phenomena that emerge from these environments.

Oftentimes, we project our motivations onto others and we fail to appreciate what “fun” is to someone else. The following narratives show how relative fun can be and the sheer diversity of ways of deriving satisfaction from the same construct. “Fun” means something different to different people.

The narratives are framed by the 3 main components, thereby illustrating how the different subcomponents can combine, but more importantly, shedding light on where more work still needs to be done. The presentation below extracts parts of long responses submitted by players and might create the illusion that players are more single-dimensional than they really are. This was done to make it easier to understand the spectrum of motivations. Most players in fact described their preferences along several motivations so make sure you browse through the profile tool to get a sense of how multi-faceted players really are.

At a Glance:

- My Story
- The Story of the World
- Quests
- Role-Playing
- Identity Exploration
- Exploring the World
- Secret Locations
- Discovery
- My Story
- Knowledge
- Fantasy
- Escapism

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My Story

A prevalent theme among players who enjoy being immersed in a game centers on developing a back-story or history for their characters. For them, it is crucial that their character makes sense and is rooted in the lore and mythos of the world.

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The Story of the World

It is also important to them to learn the story of why the state of the world is the way it is. They go out of their ways to read up on the histories of different key characters or races / tribes in order to learn the story of their world. A world that has a solid, sustained story is what allows them to do what they enjoy - creating characters that fit into and become part of the larger story.

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Quests

Quests are an important way in which the story of the character can weave into the story of the world. This is because players find themselves invited to become a part of the history.

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Role-Playing

A related motivation is social role-playing - sharing the story of your character with the stories of others in a structured way.

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Identity Exploration

Oftentimes, identity exploration and role-playing are seen as the same thing, but they are in fact different phenomena with some overlap. Role-players are focused on stories and becoming a part of the world. Players who use the game as a tool for identity exploration are less concerned with stories and more interested in trying out different personality traits as a means of introspection.

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Exploration

Many players derive satisfaction from exploring the world for the sake of exploring it. They enjoy adventuring in order to see the world.

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Others commented that it wasn’t exploring in and of itself that was fun, but instead what was rewarding was finding out-of-the-way caves, dungeons or secret locations.

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Discovery

We see the same notion of exploration and discovery in other players but focused on non-geographical elements of the game. For example, centered on quests, NPCs or obscure knowledge.

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Knowledge

What becomes clear is that for some players, the accumulation of knowledge is in and of itself deeply rewarding.

Oftentimes, this knowledge acquisition is rewarding because it can be shared with others. It’s now about knowing something as much as being able to share that knowledge with others.

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Fantasy

Immersion also refers to the more basic sense of “being somewhere else”, of being immersed in a compelling fantasy world.

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Escapism

The flip side of fantasy immersion is escapism - a desire to leave a world behind together with its problems.

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Who Needs Fantasy?

We conclude with players who feel that fantasy and immersion have no real impact on their enjoyment of a game.

In Their Own Words: The Social Component

Over the past 5 years, I have asked MMORPG players hundreds of different questions. The one that inevitably provides the most interesting responses is this one - “Why do you play?”. The following narratives show how multi-faceted every player is and how motivations intersect and influence each other. Together, these narratives provide the foundation to any other discourse about MMORPGs. After all, if we don’t understand why players are in these online worlds to begin with, then we can never truly appreciate the more complex phenomena that emerge from these environments.

Oftentimes, we project our motivations onto others and we fail to appreciate what “fun” is to someone else. The following narratives show how relative fun can be and the sheer diversity of ways of deriving satisfaction from the same construct. “Fun” means something different to different people.

The narratives are framed by the 3 main components, thereby illustrating how the different subcomponents can combine, but more importantly, shedding light on where more work still needs to be done. The presentation below extracts parts of long responses submitted by players and might create the illusion that players are more single-dimensional than they really are. This was done to make it easier to understand the spectrum of motivations. Most players in fact described their preferences along several motivations so make sure you browse through the profile tool to get a sense of how multi-faceted players really are.

At a Glance:

- The Ultimate Chat Room
- Socializing != Relationships
- Forming Relationships
- Romantic Relationships
- A Helping Hand
- Playing with RL Friends & Family
- The Guild
- Teamwork
- As Therapy or Outlet

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The Ultimate Chat Room

Socializing in MMORPGs means different things to different people. For some, the fun lies in being able to log on to a world where there’s always someone to chat with.

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There is an underlying tension that the following narrative foregrounds - that oftentimes the desire to chat with other people doesn’t translate into a desire to actually form significant relationships with other players.

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Forming Relationships

Now contrast that thread with the following narratives that illustrate the desire to form personal relationships with other players.

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A related theme are players who are open to developing a romantic relationship in these environments.

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A Helping Hand

Altruism is highly correlated with socializing and forming relationships. Perhaps this is because helping someone else is the easiest way to meet someone new in the game and strike up a conversation. The more ways in which players can and are encouraged to help each other, the easier it is for players to meet each other.

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Playing with RL Friends / Family

For others, socializing in the game means socializing with friends and family rather than meeting new people. The game becomes a way to keep in touch, collaborate, and learn about each other.

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The Guild

It makes sense for players who enjoy socializing to be part of casual, friendly guilds because these groups provide a constant source of structured chatting and relationships.

In fact, stories of guild migrations show how the guild itself becomes a motivation for playing.

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Teamwork

A related theme is the satisfaction derived from working and collaborating with others in a structured way. For some, the rush of a team victory is what keeps them coming back to the game.

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As Therapy or Outlet

Several players described how these online environments provided social outlets that they do not have access to in real life. For them, MMORPGs served a much needed social function.

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It’s Not About the Social Things

And before we leave this section on Social components, I want to include narratives from players who are largely not interested in socializing with others in the game.

In Their Own Words: The Achievement Component

Over the past 5 years, I have asked MMORPG players hundreds of different questions. The one that inevitably provides the most interesting responses is this one - “Why do you play?”. The following narratives show how multi-faceted every player is and how motivations intersect and influence each other. Together, these narratives provide the foundation to any other discourse about MMORPGs. After all, if we don’t understand why players are in these online worlds to begin with, then we can never truly appreciate the more complex phenomena that emerge from these environments.

Oftentimes, we project our motivations onto others and we fail to appreciate what “fun” is to someone else. The following narratives show how relative fun can be and the sheer diversity of ways of deriving satisfaction from the same construct. “Fun” means something different to different people.

The narratives are framed by the 3 main components, thereby illustrating how the different subcomponents can combine, but more importantly, shedding light on where more work still needs to be done. The presentation below extracts parts of long responses submitted by players and might create the illusion that players are more single-dimensional than they really are. This was done to make it easier to understand the spectrum of motivations. Most players in fact described their preferences along several motivations so make sure you browse through the profile tool to get a sense of how multi-faceted players really are.

At A Glance:

- Progress & Advancement
- The Seduction of Achievement
- The Grind
- Reaching the End Game
- Recognition & Competition
- Self-Sufficiency
- Optimization

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While many players describe a desire to achieve in the game, there appear to be two different threads of where the satisfaction lies. One group of players derive satisfaction from the constant progress offered by the game mechanisms, while the other group of players are driven mainly to reach a goal (typically the end-game).

Progress / Advancement

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The Seduction of Achievement

Other players elaborate on how achievement is structured differently in MMORPGs than from real life, and it is this difference that makes advancement seductive in MMORPGs.

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The Grind

In fact, that sense of constant progress engineered by the behavioral conditioning of the game is so powerful that several players described the pleasure they derive from the grind.

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Goal-Driven

Notice that in several narratives above players explicitly talk about never wanting to reach the end-game because they consciously realize it is the constant progress they enjoy. Now contrast that theme with the following narratives that describe the opposite desire.

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Power brings Recognition

Now, while some players desire to reach the end-game for their own enjoyment, others want to reach the end-game for a slightly different goal.

This player describes an achievement motivation that interacts with the community. It’s not the case he wants to become powerful for its own sake, but he desires power because power is respected and recognized by others.

Competition

The Achievement components in one way or another are centered over the underlying theme of power and different ways of harnessing and deriving satisfaction from power. Players who enjoy advancement and progress for its own sake derive satisfaction from gaining power over time. Others enjoy power because it is respected. The following players enjoy the derivation of power that results from competing with other players.

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Self-Sufficiency

For other players, power is desired because it allows for self-sufficiency. Power for these players is not sought for social recognition, but rather, because it grants independence.

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Optimization

For many who choose this path of power, understanding the underlying game mechanics is crucial because power is derived from charts and rules, and thus knowing those rules becomes a form of power.

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It’s Not About Achievement

Of course, there are also players who don’t find achievement fun, and some of these narratives are presented here.

Motivations: The Bigger Picture

A series of t-tests were used to explore gender differences while correlations were used to explore age differences and how motivation subcomponents might be related to hours of game play per week.
(Easier-to-interpret graphs on next page.)

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Because standardized scores and effect sizes (based on continuous variables) are less-interpretable than percentages (based on categorical variables), a different way of understanding this data is presented here. The “primary motivation” for each player was inferred from their scores. A respondent was assigned a primary motivation if there was no close secondary motivation (primary * .75 > secondary). 57% of players were assigned a primary motivation based on this criteria. This is a somewhat lax criteria but serves the purpose of providing an easier interpretation of the data.

The results from the main components are presented first. Overall, 43% of players did not have a primary motivations using the above-stated criteria. Of those players who did, 20% had Achievement as their primary motivation, 20% had Immersion as their primary motivation, and 17% had the Social component as their primary motivation. The underlying gender and age differences are far more striking when presented using categorical data.

The primary subcomponent was inferred from the largest subcomponent score to preserve enough cases to show the data across the 10 subcomponents.

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Male players tend to be more driven by the Achievement subcomponents than female players, while female players tend to be more driven by the relationship and customization subcomponents. Both male and female players are equally likely to be driven by the socializing, teamwork, discovery, role-playing and escapism subcomponents. Worth noting is that there is a gender difference in the relationship subcomponent but not in the socializing subcomponent although these two subcomponents may seem highly interconnected. In other words, male players socialize just as much as female players but are looking for very different things in those relationships.

Older players are most unlike younger players in the Achievement subcomponents for both male and female players. Younger players are more likely to be driven by advancement, competition and understanding the underlying mechanics. Older players and younger players are not significantly different in terms of the Socializing or Immersion subcomponents.

The best correlates with hours played per week were the advancement and mechanics subcomponents for male players, and the relationship component for female players. In other words, the reasons why men spend a lot of time in the game are different from the reasons why women spend a lot of time in the game. Men who spend a lot of time in the game are using that time to gain levels, get rare items and understand the game mechanics, whereas women who spend a lot of time in the game are using that time to build personal relationships.

The best predictors of hours played per week were explored using a multiple regression with gender, age and the 10 subcomponents as predictors. The model was significant at p < .001 with an adjusted R2 of .06 (not very good model, weak predictors). The best predictor was the advancement subcomponent (Beta = .13, p < .001) followed by the relationship subcomponent (Beta = .10, p < .001). However, none of the subcomponents turned out to be good predictors of hours played per week.

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The best predictors of problematic usage were explored using a multiple regression with gender, age, hours per week and the 10 subcomponents as factors. A survey scale for problematic usage was developed using the following items (on a fully-labeled 5-point scale using construct-specific response options). These items are based on Ian Danforth’s work that teased apart the Engagement factor from the Addiction factor.

• Do you spend more time than you think you should playing the game?
• How difficult would it be for you to limit your playing time?
• How agitated do you get if the servers go down unexpectedly?
• How often do your friends or family members complain about your game play behavior?
• Has your work/school performance suffered because of your game play?
• How much of your happiness in life currently is derived from playing the game?
• Have your personal relationships suffered because of your game-play?

A principal components analysis revealed a single factor with an eigenvalue greater than 1 that accounted for 47% of the overall variance. All items loaded onto this factor with a factor loading between .52 and .79.

The multiple regression was significant at p < .001 with an adjusted R2 of .33 (a good model with strong predictors). The best predictor of problematic usage was the escapism subcomponent (Beta = .31, p < .001), followed by hours played per week (Beta = .27, p < .001) and then the advancement subcomponent (Beta = .18, p < .001).

The results of this multiple regression are interesting in that it shows the escapism subcomponent to be the best predictor of problematic usage. In other words, it is the players who use the online environment as an escape from RL problems that are most likely to develop problematic usage patterns. This is in contrast with claims that it is something inherent in online games that cause addiction and problematic usage. Now, the advancement subcomponent is also a good predictor but not as strong as the escapism subcomponent. The data show that the primary cause of problematic usage are pre-existing RL problems rather than something inherent to online games, and that the game mechanics (often claimed to be strongly addictive) are in fact weaker predictors of problematic usage than the state-of-mind of the player.

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Respondents also answered (yes / no) whether they had:

- Been on a raid for at least 8 hours
- Ever used a third-party macro or app
- Bought a virtual item / currency
- Ever had an opposite gender character as their main

A series of logistic regressions were used to see which of the 10 subcomponents, in addition to gender and age, might be good predictors for the above 4 statements.

The best predictor for “8 hour raids” was the relationship subcomponent (B = .66, p < .001) followed by the teamwork subcomponent (B = .39, p < .001). While this may seem unintuitive, it does make sense that it is the people who are most interested in serious sustained relationships that would end up in raids of significant duration. And in fact, female players are more likely to have been in an 8 hour raid than male players (35% vs. 26%).

The best predictor for “3rd party macro” was the competition subcomponent (B = .28, p < .001) followed by the mechanics subcomponent (B = .22, p < .001). In other words, third party macros are a way for players to gain an edge over the competition and “optimize” their characters.

The best predictor for “bought virtual item” was age (B = .32, p < .001) followed by the relationship subcomponent (B = .28, p < .001). Age is a significant predictor because of disposable income, but I have no good explanation for why the relationship subcomponent would be a good predictor.

The best predictor for “gender-bending” was the role-playing subcomponent (B = .26, p < .001) followed by the customization subcomponent (B = .24, p < .001).

A Model of Player Motivations

Asking MMORPG players why they play reveals a dazzling array of varied motivations. Indeed, this wide variation illustrates why MMORPGs are so appealing - because they are able to attract people with very different motivations for playing.

Being able to articulate and build an empirical model of these underlying motivations provides an important foundation to several other avenues of research. First, it gives us a meaningful way to differentiate players from one another as well as allowing us to explore, for example, how older gamers are different from younger gamers. Second, a model of player motivations provides a tool to explore in-game preferences and behaviors. For example, which players are most likely to become guild leaders or which players are most likely to exhibit problematic usage?

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Bartle’s Player Types are a well-known model of player motivations. In that paper, Bartle provides important insight into how players may differ from one another and he suggests a categorization of 4 Types (Socializer, Achievers, Killers and Explorers) based on two underlying axes. Recently, Bartle further developed this model into a model of 8 Player Types (see Designing Virtual Worlds by Bartle, 2004).

Bartle’s theoretical model, while providing important insight, suffers from several limitations.

1) Proposed components of each Type may not be related. For example, Bartle proposes that role-playing and socialization both fall under the same Type, but they may not be highly-correlated.

2) Proposed Types may overlap with each other. For example, aren’t members of raid-oriented guilds both Achievers and Socializers? But in Bartle’s Types, they are on opposite corners of the model.

3) The purely theoretical model provides no means to assess players as to what Type they are. But more importantly, without resolving the problem in (1), any attempted assessment of players based on this model might be creating player types rather than measuring them.

In essence, it would be hard to use Bartle’s model on a practical basis unless it was validated with and grounded in empirical data. For example, Bartle suggested that different Player Types influenced each other in certain ways. But unless we have a way of assessing and identifying players of different Types, theories built on top of Bartle’s model are inherently unfalsifiable. While a “Bartle Test” (not made by Bartle) does exist, the dichotomous, forced-choice nature of that assessment tool merely perpetuates the assumptions of Bartle’s Types rather than validating them. In this article, I present a methodology used to validate Bartle’s model and how the results are similar and different from Bartle’s proposed model.

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I used an iterative process to validate, expand and refine a player motivation model empirically over the past few years. First, a list of possible motivations for playing an MMORPG was generated from existing literature (such as Bartle’s Types) or open-ended responses from earlier surveys (see here and here).

These motivations were then converted into survey questions, such as:

How important is it you to level up as fast as possible?

- Not Important At All
- Slightly Important
- Moderately Important
- Very Important
- Tremendously Important

The full list of questions used and information on administering the assessment tool is provided here.

Respondents then rated each statement on an online survey. In the current data set, 3200 respondents completed an inventory of 39 items. A factor analysis 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 are indeed related.
2) Ensured that different motivations are indeed different.
3) Provided a way to assess these motivations.

I’d like to stress the iterative nature of this endeavor. The open-ended responses and brainstorming hint at the boundaries of the territory, tested by the factor analysis, at which point I return to open-ended responses to better explore the areas the factor analysis identified as coherent constructs. Respondent responses then inevitably shed light on nuances of motivations that I generate further statements to explore.

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The current data set revealed 10 factors that then neatly factored into 3 overarching factors. We can think of these as subcomponents and main components respectively. Detailed information on the factor analyses is provided on the last page of this article. The 3 main components are presented here with their subcomponents.

The descriptions below emphasize what it means to score high on the subcomponents. Scoring low on these subcomponents is just as revealing. For example, a player who scores low in the Socializing subcomponent would prefer game mechanics that don’t force them to interact with others (i.e., character dependencies in EQ - binds, teleports, rezzes). For the sake of brevity, the “flip side” of every subcomponent is not explicitly stated.

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The Achievement Component:

Advancement: Gamers who score high on this subcomponent derive satisfaction from reaching goals, leveling quickly and accumulating in-game resources such as gold. They enjoy making constant progress and gaining power in the forms offered by the game - combat prowess, social recognition, or financial/industrial superiority. Gamers who score high on this subcomponent are typically drawn to serious, hard-core guilds that can facilitate their advancement.

Mechanics: Gamers who score high on Mechanics derive satisfaction from analyzing and understanding the underlying numerical mechanics of the system. For example, they may be interested in calculating the precise damage difference between dual-wielding one-handed swords vs. using a two-handed sword, or figuring out the resolution order of dodges, misses, and evasions. Their goal in understanding the underlying system is typically to facilitate templating or optimizing a character that excels in a particular domain.

Competition: Gamers who score high on this subcomponent enjoy the rush and experience of competing with other gamers on the battlefield or economy. This includes both fair, constrained challenges - such as dueling or structured PvP/RvR, as well as unprovoked acts - such as scamming or griefing. Gamers who score high on this subcomponent enjoy the power of beating or dominating other players.

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The Social Component:

Socializing: Gamers who score high on this subcomponent enjoy meeting and getting to know other gamers. They like to chit-chat and gossip with other players as well as helping out others in general - whether these be less-experienced players or existing friends. Gamers who score high on this subcomponent are typically drawn to casual, friendly guilds.

Relationship: Gamers who score high on this subcomponent are looking to form sustained, meaningful relationships with others. They do not mind having personal and meaningful conversations with others that touch on RL issues or problems. They typically seek out close online friends when they need support and give support when others are dealing with RL crises or problems.

Teamwork: Gamers who score high on Teamwork enjoy working and collaborating with others. They would rather group than solo, and derive more satisfaction from group achievements than from individual achievements. Gamers who score low on this subcomponent prefer to solo and find it extremely important to be self-sufficient and not have to rely on other gamers. They typically group only when it is absolutely necessary.

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The Immersion Component:

Discovery: Players who score high on Discovery enjoy exploring the world and discovering locations, quests or artifacts that others may not know about. They enjoy traveling just to see different parts of the world as well as investigating physical locations (such as dungeons and caves). They enjoy collecting information, artifacts or trinkets that few others have.

Role-Playing: Players who score high on Role-Playing enjoy being immersed in a story through the eyes of a character that they designed. These players typically take time to read or understand the back-story of the world as well as taking time to create a history and story for their characters. Also, they enjoy role-playing their characters as a way of integrating their character into the larger ongoing story of the world.

Customization: Players who score high on this subcomponent enjoy customizing the appearance of their characters. It is very important to them that their character has a unique style or appearance. They like it when games offer a breadth of customization options and take time to make sure that their character has a coherent color scheme and style.

Escapism: Gamers who score high on Escapism use the environment as a place to relax or relieve their stress from the real world. These players may use the game as a way to avoid thinking about their RL problems or in general as a way to escape RL.

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The subcomponents generated by the factor analysis are NOT player types. It is NOT the case that we have come up with 10 boxes that we can put players in, but rather, we have revealed 10 subcomponents that co-exist and together reveal the motivations of a player. Bartle assumed that your underlying motivations “suppressed” each other. In other words, the more of an Achiever you were, the less of a Socializer, Explorer and Killer you could be, but just because you like ice-cream doesn’t mean you will hate pasta. The assumption of polarized motivations is also not supported by the correlations of the current data set. The Achievement component is not negatively correlated with the Socializing component as Bartle’s model would predict. In fact, it is mildly positively correlated (r = .10, p < .001). A more detailed comparison between the Types vs. Components approach is presented in a separate article.

The factor analysis also revealed several important ways where the data differed from Bartle’s theoretical model:

1) Socializing and Role-Playing: Bartle proposed that people who like to chat and make friends are also the people who like to role-play. These are in fact two independent motivations.

2) Achieving and Competing: While Bartle proposed that Achievers and Griefers were separate Types, they are in fact fairly correlated with each other. The Advancement and Competition subcomponents are correlated at r = .41, p < .001.

3) The Explorer Type: Bartle construed Explorer’s as people who enjoyed both exploring the world, gathering information as well as enjoying tinkering with the underlying system and mechanics. These are also in fact two different kinds of people. My earlier attempts to find the Bartle Explorer failed until I tried to look for those two constructs separately. In other words, there is a Discovery subcomponent that revolves around finding and accumulating knowledge that is separate from the Mechanics subcomponent that is interested at unraveling and tinkering with the game mechanics.

4) Immersion: There is also a separate set of motivations that didn’t exist in Bartle’s Types. The Immersion subcomponents revolve around story-line, role-playing, fantasy, customization and escapism and are independent of the Socializing motivations.

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In his book, Designing Virtual Worlds (2004), Bartle critiqued an earlier model of player motivations also derived from factor analyses. Here I present and respond to some of those critiques.

1) The motivations suggested by the survey are implicit in the questions. While that is true, the survey doesn’t implicitly presume a grouping of statements and that was the more important goal of the survey - to understand what statements did correlate to form a “subcomponent” rather than simply assuming such. For example, we found that socializing and role-playing are independent constructs.

2) Brainstorming motivations is as subjective as brainstorming player types. The important difference though is that the brainstormed motivations are then empirically tested to find validated constructs. The data showing discrepancies with Bartle’s original Types illustrate how player motivations can’t simply be brainstormed. They must be tested.

3) The labeling of the facets is not provided by the factor analysis. Nor are the labels of the Player Types inherent in any way. The Player Type labels suffer from the more serious problem of labeling a cluster of motivations that are not really correlated.

4) Some of the facets overlap, but some don’t. And the only way we can know this is by having a validated tool for assessment and then observing the underlying correlations. And in fact, the Player Types also overlap, but this was not apparent until we had a way of measuring those motivations. More importantly, the current model of 3 main components is largely uncorrelated with each other (all around r = .10).

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Details of Factor Analysis

A principal components analysis was performed to arrive at a parsimonious representation of the associations among the 39 items. 10 factors were extracted with eigenvalues greater than 1. Together, these factors accounted for 60% of the overall variance. The chart below shows the factor loadings of the survey items used.

The scores for all subcomponents were generated for each of the 3200 respondents using a regression method. Another principal components was performed on the 10 subcomponent scores. 3 factors were extracted with eigenvalues greater than 1. Together, these 3 factors accounted for 54% of the overall variance. These 3 factors are largely uncorrelated (r’s ~ .10). The chart below shows the factor loadings of the subcomponents on the 3 main components.

Posted by nyee at 8:19 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

Faces of Grief

As Bartle pointed out in his Player Types paper, Achievers and Griefers are different points on the same spectrum - Achievers act on the world while Griefers act on other players. A factor-based model of player motivations created from player survey data suggests that a desire for power and control are the underlying themes that connect Achievers and Griefers. Achievers enjoy the power derived from items and abilities and the increased control these give them over the game world (faster movement, better protection, etc.). Griefers on the other hand enjoy the power derived from dominating or tricking other players and the control this gives them over other players. The underlying similarity between Achievers and Griefers is supported by survey data. These two motivations are highly correlated (r = .40, N = 1995).

Unsolicited or unbalanced player-killing is the most straight-forward form of griefing - it in essence deprives another player of all his power and in the process demonstrates the griefer’s dominance and control over other people.

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Different methods of scamming and theft also demonstrate forms of power and control. In these cases, griefers derive pleasure from gaining control over the possessions of unwilling victims.

In fact, what becomes clear is that many griefers seem to prefer subtle forms of domination rather than overt forms such as player-killing. After all, the more devious and cunning the act, the more pleasure it provides. Now, griefers will gloat once the act succeeds, but the most devious acts typically require the most subtlety and planning. It is easy to kill someone. It is much harder to trick someone into willingly handing over all their gold.

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This makes it easier to understand what emotional griefing is about. Instead of gaining control over someone’s life or possessions, emotional griefing seeks to gain control over someone’s emotions by causing them distress, guilt or shame.

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The following narrative demonstrates just how much trouble and time a player may go through to grief another player emotionally.

External Link:
Grief Player Motivations by Chek Yang Foo

Four Boxes

The following article has nothing to do with MMORPGs. I had read about a game theory problem online and wanted to replicate the results with a larger sample (although I felt it was more of a psychological problem than a game theory problem). Respondents were shown the following:

Sam is going to hide $100 in 1 of 4 boxes, as seen below. After Sam has hidden the money, Pat has one chance to guess where the money is hidden. If Pat guesses correctly, Pat will get the money, otherwise Sam gets the money.

Each respondent was randomly assigned into two conditions:

1) If you were Sam, where would you hide the money?
2) If you were Pat, where would you look for the money?

Respondents were also asked to briefly explain their reasoning behind their choice using the abbreviations A1, B, A2, and A3 in their explanations.

Before going on to see the results and the reasoning that respondents gave for their choice, you may want to think for a moment as to where you would have hidden or looked for the money.

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Below are samples of the explanation of choices from respondents. Responses were interesting in that many explanations were very convincing in a particular selection, but in their overall persuasiveness began to reveal the intractable “what if” black hole that could easily be used to argue for equal distribution of choices among the four boxes.

Hide (A1):

Find (A1):

Hide (B):

Find (B):

Hide (A2):

Find (A2):

Hide (A3):

Find (A3):

I hope you’re semi-convinced that there is good reason to hide it in any of the four boxes, and it is this overall persuasiveness that leads to the “what if” black-hole scenario, and several respondents argued that the choices would be equally distributed among the four boxes:

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What is striking is that this is not the case. The distribution of choices was far from random. 40% of respondents would hide it in Box A2, and almost 60% of respondents would look in that box as their guess.

One possible psychological reasoning is that people have been shown to like the third option in a multiple choice format. This is why the correct answer on multiple-choice exams is much more likely to be “C”, and also why students are most likely to guess the answer “C” on multiple choice exams. To show that this is not simply the “third option” effect. I switched the B box to the third position and continued running the survey.

The results showed that whatever was going on, it wasn’t the “third option” effect, and that despite all the convoluted reasoning, there’s something very compelling about that middle A box. While it now becomes easy to claim that there was good reason to expect that this is because “xyz”, it’s also true that it’s easy to generate explanations post-facto and that it would have been possible to generate post-facto explanations for any of the four choices.

I’m leaning towards the sense that there is something illogical (psychological) rather than logical about this overall trend. I don’t think Box A2 is any more or less logical a choice as any other box. But I would love to hear your comments.

Revised Motivations Framework

More recent data on player motivations is available here.

A model of player motivations based on empirical data was first attempted in the Facets study. While it was clear that different players derived satisfaction in very different ways (for example, gender differences), it wasn’t clear what those different elements were or how they should be grouped, assessed or related to other aspects of game-play.

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. Respondents then rated their agreement to each of these statements. A factor analysis 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) Ensure that components of each motivation are indeed related.
2) Ensure that different motivations are indeed different.
3) Provide a way to assess these motivations.

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In a sense, this methodology was testing Bartle’s Types for validity and correcting for inherent problems with a purely theoretical model:

1) Proposed components of each Type may not be related. For example, Bartle proposes that role-playing and socialization both fall under the same Type, but they may not be highly-correlated.

2) Proposed Types may overlap with each other. For example, aren’t members of raid-oriented guilds both Achievers and Socializers? But in Bartle’s Types, they are on opposite corners of the model.

3) The purely theoretical model provides no means to assess players as to what Type they are. But more importantly, without resolving the problem in (1), any attempted assessment of players based on this model might be creating player types rather than measuring them.

There were several problems with the Facets study however:

1) The statements in several factors did not have high enough reliability to be used as assessment tools. Reliability is a measure of whether a combination of statements are a good assessment of a common attitude or trait.

2) The lack of an Explorer Type was unsettling.

3) Perhaps a casual socializer (chatting, conversations) should be included in addition to the heavy socializer (relationships, support).

4) Perhaps a competitiveness factor should be included to contrast the Griefers who like to manipulate other players from the Competitors who enjoy competing with other players in a fair way.

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In light of these concerns, a new set of statements were run, by including elements mentioned in (3) and (4), and by changing the response options to be construct-specific. Literature in survey methodologies has suggested that the “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” type response choices yield lower reliability due to acquiescence and ambiguity. The suggested practice is to match response choices to the variable of interest in the question stem using extreme responses as anchors. For example,

It is very important to me to level up as fast as possible.
- Strongly Agree
- Agree
- Neither
- Disagree
- Strongly Disagree

How important is it you to level up as fast as possible?
- Not Important At All
- Slightly Important
- Moderately Important
- Very Important
- Tremendously Important

This change in response choice construction was made to improve the overall reliability of the statements used.

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Here are the statements that were used:

How important are the following things to you?

- Leveling up your character as fast as possible.
- Acquiring rare items that most players will never have.
- Becoming powerful.
- Accumulating resources, items or money.
- Knowing as much about the game mechanics and rules as possible.
- Having a self-sufficient character.
- Being immersed in a fantasy world.
- Escaping from the real world.

How much do you enjoy the following things?

- Helping other players.
- Getting to know other players.
- Hanging out with good friends.
- Chatting with other players.
- Competing with other players.
- Dominating/killing other players.
- Exploring every map or zone in the world.
- Being part of a friendly, casual guild.
- Being part of a serious, raid/loot-oriented guild.
- Trying out new roles and personalities with your characters.
- Doing things to make other players angry.

How often do you do the following things?

- 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?
- How often do you make up stories and histories for your characters?
- How often do you role-play your character?
- How often do you play so you can avoid thinking about some of your real-life problems or worries?
- How often do you play to relax from the day's work?
- How often do you purposefully try to annoy other players?

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The resulting factors are shown here with their reliability score (Cronbach’s Alpha) and the statements they are based on. A reliability of .7 or higher is typically sufficient in psychometrics:

Achievement (Reliability = .78)
Leveling up your character as fast as possible.
Acquiring rare items that most players will never have.
Becoming powerful.
Accumulating resources, items or money.

Casual Socializer / Chat (Reliability = .78)
Helping other players.
Getting to know other players.
Chatting with other players.
Being part of a friendly, casual guild.
How often do you find yourself having meaningful conversations with other players?

Immersion / Role-Playing (Reliability = .75)
Being immersed in a fantasy world.
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)
Competing with other players.
Dominating/killing other players.
Doing things to make other players angry.
How often do you purposefully try to annoy other players?

Escapism (Reliability = .72)
How often do you play so you can avoid thinking about some of your real-life problems or worries?
Escaping from the real world.

The three statements used to test the Explorer type did not correlate highly with each other, and have low reliability:

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 also included the following statements, none of which correlate above r = .20:

- 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.

However, in the current data set, the Achievement factor is correlated with interest in game mechanics (r=.46) and self-sufficiency (r=.29). So perhaps all Explorers are in fact Achievers. They are interested in the game mechanics to become better Achievers.

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The following maps out how the motivations differ by gender and how they are correlated with age and hours played per week. All gender differences noted below are significant at p < .001 in a t-test. For brevity, only the direction and effect size of each difference is noted.

In other words, male players tend to score higher on the Achievement and Competition factors, while female players tend to score higher on the Socialization factors. Younger players are more likely to prefer Achievement and Competition, and players who score high on Achievement, Serious Socialization or Escapism tend to spend the most number of hours per week in the environment.

Applying Psychology to MMORPGs: Automatic Mimicry

Research in social and organizational psychology has consistently shown for many years that when people or groups interact, many of their verbal and non-verbal cues become synchronized almost immediately. For example, the timing of gestures becomes synchronized (Kendon, 1970), and group members mirror each other’s posture and mannerisms (LaFrance, 1982; LaFrance & Broadbent, 1976). Individuals in a conversation will also mirror each other’s accents and speech patterns (Cappella & Panalp, 1981), and syntax (Levelt & Kelter, 1982). In fact, many human behaviors seem to be contagious, such as yawning (Provine, 1986), laughter (Provine, 1992), and even moods (Neumann & Strack, 2000). Researchers have suggested that this synchronization is an automatic human behavior that functions as a regulator of trust and rapport in social interactions (Kendon, 1970; LaFrance, 1982).

Recent research has demonstrated more precisely that when people interact, they in fact unconsciously mimic each other’s behavior. In one study (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999), subjects interacted with a confederate (a research assistant who pretends to be another subject) in a collaborative task. The confederate performed a series of movements (foot shaking and touching their face) and it was found that subjects would unintentionally match those behaviors themselves. More importantly, in a different part of that study, confederates were asked to either mimic or not mimic the subject’s behaviors and it was found that subjects judged confederate mimickers as more likeable than confederate non-mimickers.

Instead of merely influencing attitudes, automatic mimicry has also been shown to influence observable behaviors as well. For example, waiters who verbally mimic their customers’ orders (by repeating the order) receive bigger tips than when they say something else instead (like ‘Coming right up’) (van Baaren, Holland, Steenaert, & van Knippenberg, 2003). In fact, when a person is mimicked, they become more generous not only towards the mimicker, but to everyone else in general (van Baaren, Holland, Kawakami, & van Knippenberg, 2004). Mimicry increases an individual’s prosocial behavior. This process also happens the other way. Affiliation goals increase the frequency of automatic mimicry in interactions (Lakin & Chartrand, 2003).

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This has led researchers to hypothesize that automatic mimicry is an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate and express social affiliation and that the process is bi-directional - mimicry facilitates affiliation and prosocial behavior and affiliation goals increase mimicry (Lakin, Jefferis, Cheng, & Chartrand, 2003). This theory is also supported by studies that have shown that very young infants will mimic many facial expressions they perceive, such as sticking their tongue out, smiling and opening their mouths (Meltzoff & Moore, 1977).

Virtual environments in fact provide a perfect setting for embedding subtle mimicry behaviors in NPCs because details in the environment can be rendered differently for each user. The goal of embedding mimicry would be to increase prosocial behavior in general in the community. After all, loyalty and bonds with other players is what keeps players in a community.

Examples of this embedding range from the simple to the complex. Of course, the following are not meant to be employed with every single NPC interaction, but instead used intermittently to seed prosocial behavior.

- Align the NPCs appearance with the character’s appearance. Match their hair color, their clothing style, or the weapon they are carrying.

- Match the first letter of the NPCs first name with the first letter of the character’s first name.

- Store the user’s style of greeting other users by matching with a small database of known greeting words, such as ‘hi’, ‘hey’, ‘what’s up’, and so on, and have the NPC greet the user with the appropriate words.

- Store the verbosity of users’ exchanges with other users. Laconic users prefer laconic NPCs and verbose users prefer verbose NPCs - it functions as an approximation for personality differences.

The often-assumed freedom that comes with virtual worlds is a double-edged sword. In the real world, laws constrain behavior, but in virtual worlds, code dictates behavior. If shouting is not allowed in virtual worlds, then you cannot shout in public spaces. You can communicate with other users only through tools provided by the virtual world. In a strange way, relationships in virtual worlds are not created as much as engineered by the mechanics of the world. As these environments evolve, they might - for better or worse - become tools of social engineering that were never imagined even possible in the real world.

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References

Cappella, J., & Panalp, A. (1981). Talk and Silence Sequences in Informal Conversations. Interspeaker Influence. Human Communication Research, 7, 117-132.

Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception-behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 76(6), 893-910.

Kendon, A. (1970). Movement Coordination in social interactions. Acta Psychologica, 32(2), 101-125.

LaFrance, M. (1982). Posture Mirroring and Rapport. In M. Davis (Ed.), Interaction Rhythms: Periodicity in Communicative Behavior (pp. 279-298).

LaFrance, M., & Broadbent, M. (1976). Group Rapport: Posture Sharing as a Nonverbal Indicator. Group and Organizational Studies, 1, 328-333.

Lakin, J. L., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). Using nonconscious behavioral mimicry to create affiliation and rapport. Psychological Science, 14(4), 334-339.

Lakin, J. L., Jefferis, V. E., Cheng, C. M., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). The chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious mimicry. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27(3), 145-162.

Levelt, W., & Kelter, S. (1982). Surface form and memory in question answering. Cognitive Psychology, 14(78-106).

Meltzoff, A., & Moore, A. (1977). Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates. Science, 198(75-78).

Neumann, R., & Strack, F. (2000). Mood Contagion: The automatic transfer of mood between persons. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 79, 211-223.

Provine, R. (1986). Yawning as a stereotyped action pattern and releasing stimulus. Ethology, 72, 109-122.

Provine, R. (1992). Contagious Laughter: Laughter is sufficient stimulus for laughs and smiles. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 30(1-4).

van Baaren, R. B., Holland, R. W., Kawakami, K., & van Knippenberg, A. (2004). Mimicry and Prosocial Behavior. Psychological Science, 15(1), 71-74.

van Baaren, R. B., Holland, R. W., Steenaert, B., & van Knippenberg, A. (2003). Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(4), 393-398.

It's A Matter of Perspective

In a sample of 2200 respondents across several MMORPGs (29% EQ, 23% SWG, 12% DAOC), the following gender difference emerged as to preference for 1st or 3rd person perspective. The answer choice "prefer both equally" is excluded from this brief presentation for clarity.

While there were differences between games (i.e. more EQ players preferred 1PP, and more DAOC players preferred 3PP), the gender difference was always present in every game. Exploring the data by age groups also revealed a similar pattern.

Because female players tend to be older than male players, it is possible that the above two graphs may be showing the same underlying factor. To show that age and gender are in fact impacting preference for perspective independently, the 1PP case is shown below split by gender and age groups. Women always prefer 1PP across all age groups.

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Past data had suggested that gender differences are driven by different motivations for participation. In very broad strokes, female players are more drawn to relationship-oriented activities while male players are more drawn to achievement-oriented activities.

The perception and use of an avatar - as the primary means of agency in online environments - might be expected to be shaped by the motivations for participating in the environment. In particular, goal-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as tools/pawns to achieve goals, thereby encouraging a preference for 3PP that objectifies and externalizes the avatar, whereas relationship-oriented users may be more likely to treat avatars as representations of themselves in a social environment, thereby encouraging identification and treating the avatar as the self through 1PP. This would also be supported by the age differences given that younger players tend to be more achievement-driven. In other words, I argue that more fundamental motivational differences are driving the gender and age differences.

To test this line of reasoning more directly, users who preferred 1PP vs 3PP were compared on their motivations for playing based on an assessment derived from a previous study. Users who preferred 3PP scored higher on Achievement (t = 5.5, p < .001) and Grief (t = 8.5, p < .001), and lower on Relationship (t = -8.0, p < .001) than users who preferred 1PP, which supports the hypothesis.

To tease apart the relative importance of age, gender and the motivations, a logistic regression was performed using 1PP/3PP as the categorical predicted variable. The Relationship motivation emerged as the most significant predictor (t = 7.7, p < .001), followed by age (t = 6.2, p < .001), Grief (t = -5.0, p < .001) and then gender (t = 2.38, p = .002).

Thus, it appears that the observed gender difference is being driven by underlying motivational differences between users who play to form and sustain relationships and users who objectify the environment and other users for personal gain. In either way, what is clear is that motivational differences are linked with preferences for perspectives in these environments.

While causality can't be directly inferred from this data set, the opposite claim that default (or fixed) perspective shapes motivations for playing doesn't easily explain the observed gender differences.

Achievement and Frustration in MMORPGs

The rewards cycle and the well-textured layers of goals (hunting, crafting, questing) combine to create an environment where the seduction of self-achievement may grow very strong. The ability to become stronger, more competent, more skilled and more valued on a gradual but predictable basis can be intoxicating. Players were asked whether they derived a larger sense of achievement in the game or in their real lives. About 20% of players felt that they derived a larger sense of achievement in the game when compared with their real lives. While there were no gender differences (p = .48), age was mildly negatively correlated (r = -.14, p < .001) with feeling more achievement from the game. Users who felt a larger sense of achievement in the game spend significantly more time in the game than players who felt a larger sense of achievement in real life.

On the other hand, these games don’t make it easy to advance in the higher levels, and advancement is often a path of trials. Thus, players were also asked whether they encountered more frustration and annoyances in the game or in real life. Overall, 22% of players indicated that they encountered more frustrations and annoyances in the game than in real life. There were no gender (p = .94) or age differences (r = -.07). Users who encountered more frustrations in the game do not spend any more time in the game than users who encountered more frustrations in real life. The only good predictor seemed to be whether the player was motivated to play to distress from real life (r = .17, p < .001). This makes sense because it is the users who want to relax who would be most frustrated by the annoyances of the game.

Finally, the two measures were not correlated (r = .00, p = .93), implying that whether a player derives more or less achievement in the environment has no bearing on whether they encounter more or less frustrations in the game when compared with real life.

The Seduction of Achievement in MMORPGs

The fairy tales we grow up with and our schooling system hold a particular vision of how people are rewarded and how goals are achieved in life. Goals and rewards are well-defined – the prince has to slay the dragon to marry the princess, or you need to write the alphabets three times before you get a sticker. Moreover, you will reach the goal if you put in enough effort – princes always defeat the dragon, and you can always get that sticker if you finish your work.

After 6 years of fairy tales and then 16 years of school, we are then exposed to the real world. In the real world, goals are seldom well-defined, More importantly, the amount of effort you put into something isn’t guaranteed to get you any closer to your goal. Sometimes, you put in very little effort and hit the jackpot. Other times, you work week after week to get an incredibly small payoff. One of the disillusions of being an adult is that the framework of goals and rewards we learned the first 22 years of our lives suddenly stops working.

Unlike single-player and limited multi-players games, MMORPGs offer social rewards and achievements. High-leveled characters have social prestige, are perceived as powerful, and are valuable members in their guilds. More importantly, these rewards follow the framework that we learned as children. Levels are clearly defined goals. When you are given a quest, they tell you exactly what you need to do. And when you’ve done what they want, you get the sticker … I mean level.

Achievement in MMORPGs is seductive because the goals are well-defined, the journey is well-defined, and the rewards are social and persistent. Games in non-persistent worlds destroy the illusion of achievement when you quit the game – your “achievement” has suddenly vanished, gone unrecognized, and become inconsequential. In an MMORPG, you accumulate what you have achieved in a character that is a part of a community that recognizes your power and competence. Your efforts and achievements in MMORPGs gain a consequential realism that other games do not provide because they are persistent.

Unlike the real world where effort does not translate into achievement, MMORPGs offer an environment where you know exactly what your effort is going towards and a good sense of how far you are from your goals. Unlike the real world where connections, chance and family background are what mostly determine your success, anyone can become rich, powerful, and admired in an MMORPG if they put enough effort into it. In a strange way, The American Dream – the belief that anyone can become successful if they work hard enough – does exist, but it exists in worlds like Norrath and Camelot.

The Seduction of Achievement in MMORPGs

The fairy tales we grow up with and our schooling system hold a particular vision of how people are rewarded and how goals are achieved in life. Goals and rewards are well-defined – the prince has to slay the dragon to marry the princess, or you need to write the alphabets three times before you get a sticker. Moreover, you will reach the goal if you put in enough effort – princes always defeat the dragon, and you can always get that sticker if you finish your work.

After 6 years of fairy tales and then 16 years of school, we are then exposed to the real world. In the real world, goals are seldom well-defined, More importantly, the amount of effort you put into something isn’t guaranteed to get you any closer to your goal. Sometimes, you put in very little effort and hit the jackpot. Other times, you work week after week to get an incredibly small payoff. One of the disillusions of being an adult is that the framework of goals and rewards we learned the first 22 years of our lives suddenly stops working.

Unlike single-player and limited multi-players games, MMORPGs offer social rewards and achievements. High-leveled characters have social prestige, are perceived as powerful, and are valuable members in their guilds. More importantly, these rewards follow the framework that we learned as children. Levels are clearly defined goals. When you are given a quest, they tell you exactly what you need to do. And when you’ve done what they want, you get the sticker … I mean level.

Achievement in MMORPGs is seductive because the goals are well-defined, the journey is well-defined, and the rewards are social and persistent. Games in non-persistent worlds destroy the illusion of achievement when you quit the game – your “achievement” has suddenly vanished, gone unrecognized, and become inconsequential. In an MMORPG, you accumulate what you have achieved in a character that is a part of a community that recognizes your power and competence. Your efforts and achievements in MMORPGs gain a consequential realism that other games do not provide because they are persistent.

Unlike the real world where effort does not translate into achievement, MMORPGs offer an environment where you know exactly what your effort is going towards and a good sense of how far you are from your goals. Unlike the real world where connections, chance and family background are what mostly determine your success, anyone can become rich, powerful, and admired in an MMORPG if they put enough effort into it. In a strange way, The American Dream – the belief that anyone can become successful if they work hard enough – does exist, but it exists in worlds like Norrath and Camelot.

The Demographics of Motivations

A simplified version of the motivations assessment (rating 7 statements) was tested and produced results that were highly similar to the full assessment (rating 30 statements), though of course it would have been impossible to articulate the condensed scale without having the full scale. The results of the simplified assessment are presented here.

The four highest-rated motivations for playing an MMORPG were Achievement, Immersion, Socialization, and Escapism, in that order. The reported means are only representative of the sample, drawn mostly from EQ-clones (DAOC, SWG, AO, AC etc).

For the most part, the gender and age differences are what would have been expected. The only exception may be that female players might have been expected to rate the Immersion component higher than the male players. The table also shows the relative impact of age and gender on the motivational differences and the two seem to play an equal role among the motivations.

Through The Looking-Glass

This dataset explores several aspects of identity projection through the use of avatars. When players create and play their characters, how many of them choose to act and behave pretty much the same as they do in real life, and how many deliberately try out new personalities? And do players tend to behave and act the same way across their different characters? Are there gender or age differences? And finally, do motivations for playing or personality traits have an influence on how identity is projected through avatars?

Female players are more likely to behave and interact in an MMORPG very similarly to how they behave and interact with others in real life when compared with male players.

Age, however, seems to be the more important factor.

The multiple regression results show that Introverts are more likely to behave similarly while Extraverts tend to behave more differently. Also note that Age and Extraversion do not correlate (r = -.02).

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Players were also asked how consistently they act and behave when they are playing different characters. Gender and age had no impact on the outcome of the responses.

The multiple regression results show that it is the desire for immersion and role-playing that most differentiates players who behave consistently across their characters from the players who don’t.

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Finally, respondents were asked whether they felt that they were more of “who you really are” in the MMORPG than in real life. There were no significant gender differences.

The multiple regression results echo the results from the questions on behavioral similarity, and show that Introverts are creating characters not only similar to themselves in real life, but that they act and behave in a way that they feel is more true of who they really are.

Revised Player Motivation Factors

This is a brief statistical overview of the revised player motivation factors. It is being included for completeness and for reference, and is not meant to be completely accessible to a lay audience.

The following data builds on findings from the Facets presentation. The main problem was the awkwardness of the Leadership factor which seemed too unsubstantial and imprecise.

A new factor referred to as Group Affiliation was tested as a potential replacement for the Leadership factor. The 5 statements used were:

The results were very good. Group Affiliation was independent of the other factors. The Factor Analysis results are shown here:

The clustering diagram is shown here:

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The age and gender plots (with error bars) for each factor is shown below:

Therapeutic Spaces

It is clear that an MMORPG is great for escapism – a fantastical land where the everyday clerk or secretary can be part of a group that slays dragons instead of shuffling paperwork. The following set of narratives explores how different players have used the MMORPG space as both evasion and therapy, and how the MMORPG space is both sheltering and cathartic.

We begin with players who use the MMORPG space to destress after a day of work.

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Other players use the MMORPG space as an escape from real-life burdens and problems. Oftentimes, it isn’t clear whether this evasion helps or hinders them in real-life.

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For some people, the game offers them social contact and support that they otherwise wouldn’t have because of their real life situations.

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Other players talk about how they are able to use the MMORPG space as therapy for a variety of social anxiety problems they are struggling with.

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A few players commented on how the MMORPG environment helped them deal with self-esteem issues, and how the game empowered them.

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And finally, several players offered stories on how an MMORPG and the support they found there became their solace when they had to deal with real life emotional trauma.

MMORPGs - A Love-Hate Relationship

Subscribing to an MMORPG is like having a relationship in many ways. It demands a lot of time and a lot of personal and emotional investment. And because it’ll inevitably make other people in your life jealous of the relationship you have with it.

But on a more serious note, subscribing to an MMORPG is like a love-hate relationship in that players can derive both incredible satisfaction and agony from their game-play. In a recent survey, players were asked whether the most satisfying experience in their lives over the past 7 and 30 days occurred in the game or in real life. On average, about 27% of players indicated that the most satisfying experience over the past 7 days occurred in the game, and 18% of players indicated the same when the wording was changed to “over the past 30 days”. Younger players were more likely to indicate that the most satisfying experience over the past 7 or 30 days occurred in the game. There were no gender differences.

Players were then asked whether the most annoying or infuriating event they had experienced over the past 7 or 30 days occurred in the game or in real life. On average, about 33% of players indicated that the most infuriating experience over the past 7 days occurred in the game, and 23% of players indicated the same when the wording was changed to “over the past 30 days”. It’s interesting that players seem to experience more infuriating than rewarding experiences, and yet the game is still appealing. Younger players were more likely to indicate that the most infuriating experience over the past 7 or 30 days occurred in the game. There were no gender differences.

These two sets of data hint at the degree of personal and emotional investment that players put into these immersive worlds, and the degree to which they are willing to revel and suffer in these digital constructs. And ultimately, part of why MMORPGs are so seductive is because they are able to elicit such strong emotional responses from us – whether good or bad, and somehow even though there are days you writhe in agony from a fatal loss, you keep coming back for a chance at the heroic victory.

Player Personality Profiles

Most of the data that I have presented has been big-picture quantitative differences between age or gender groups. In the most recent survey I collected a large set of personality data from respondents in an attempt to validate and restructure existing models to describe and understand player behavior and preferences. In doing so, I was able to gather fairly in-depth personality profiles of individual players. As I explored these profiles, I realized that they were just as interesting as the large-scale data. Here, I will present several profiles to highlight the different reasons why people play MMORPGs.

Brief Overview of Personality Scales Used

The individual profiles consist of 3 sets of data. The first is a Dynamics model developed by Edward Murray that assesses the motivations that drive an individual. This model bears a similarity to the Enneagram, but the major difference is that this model has been empirically validated. The second set of data is taken from the Big-5 factor model of traits widely accepted among personality psychologists. Traits are overt behaviors, as opposed to the dynamics that motivate these behaviors. And finally, the third set are the 5 motivation factors for why players play MMORPGs, taken from the Facets study. Each factor will be discussed as they appear below, but you may choose to read brief descriptions of each factor before proceeding.

With the Big-5 and the Facets scales, the percentages shown in the graph are the percentile-ranks of the individual's scores within the sample of about 2000 respondents. In other words, a 75% means 25% of the sample scored higher, and 75% scored lower than this individual on this scale. With the Dynamics factors, the percentages shown are the ratios of each factor after the percentile was calculated. In other words, the Performer percentage = (Performer percentile) / (Sum of all percentiles). This is done in accordance with Edward Murray's assessment calculations.

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Let's begin with a profile of a 14 year-old male EQ player.

This individual has the attributes of a stereotypical young teenage male MMORPG player. Looking at the Dynamics factors, the high Performer and Leader scores imply that he derives most of his satisfaction from high-energy activities and asserting control over other people. Maturity changes how people channel their motivations. So immature Leaders may be bullies or tyrants, while mature Leaders provide guiding leadership and inspiration. This player's low Trait scores in Trust, Compliance and Modesty reveal that he is competitive, perhaps confrontational, self-confident and has a general mistrust for others. His high scores in Extraversion and Assertiveness go hand in hand with his high Performer and Leader scores - again a desire to assert himself in social situations. The high Leader score along with low scores in Compliance, Modesty and Trust imply that this player's social assertion is more malevolent and destructive than constructive, and this is reflected in the high Grief score in the Motivation factors. In other words, this individual enjoys tormenting and bullying other players in MMORPGs.

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Here is the profile of a 57 year-old male UO player who plays for very different reasons.

In the Dynamics graph, the high Aesthete score implies a desire to connect with larger cultural or existential issues. Aesthetes may be artists or musicians, or they could be part of a not-for-profit or religious organization. Individuals who have high Manager scores derive satisfaction from order, rules and control. Immature managers oftentimes appear obsessive and stubborn, even fanatical. Mature managers are able to use their organizational and planning abilities constructively. The high Trait score in Duty matches the high Manager score, and we get a sense that this individual has a strong sense of moral obligation and this is the focus of the Manager dynamic - duty arising from a need for order and control is very central to this man's personality. Within the game, it seems to be the Aesthete dynamic that drives the dominant motivation to be immersed in the fantasy world - to be part of a collaborative story, a mutual suspension of disbelief that arises from role-playing heavy crowds.

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Here is the profile of a 25 year-old male EQ player whose Dynamic data looks very similar to the first profile shown, but we'll see how important differences in the Traits differentiate these two individuals.

Again, we see high scores in Leader and Performer. The high Performer score implies an active lifestyle, and the high Extraversion score implies this is a very socially active individual. Compared with the first profile, this individual is less assertive and is more cooperative and easier to work with. While having a low sense of duty and obligation, this individual has a high need for organization and planning and is moderately driven to achieve. The high Leader score implies a desire to influence other people and this translates into a desire to lead groups within MMORPGs. Notice that while the teenage male chose to exert his control over other people destructively, this individual is exerting his control constructively. The high Manager score and the high Need for Order score hint at a joy of understanding the rules and mechanics of the game and deriving satisfaction from achievements within the bounds of those rules, and this is probably why this individual is achievement-driven within the game. This is a good profile for a guild leader or officer.

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And finally we end with a profile of a 21 year-old female DAOC player.

Individuals who score high in Relating derive satisfaction from intimate relationships. Immature Relating individuals may be manipulative and self-serving (instilling guilt in others) to get more affection from others. Mature Relating individuals are truly unselfish and empathetic, and have a more giving kind of affection. Loyalists seek security from group allegiance or relationship loyalty. Immature Loyalists are self-effacing, and cling to powerful figures for security, while mature Loyalists are loyal to others and are trustworthy and dependable. This individual scores high on both Loyalist and Relating and enjoys using the MMORPG world as a way to form intimate and supportive relationships. The high Modesty and Compliance scores, together with the high Loyalist score, hints at a more immature Loyalist whose sense of security is so weak that they are self-effacing and that she gives in easily to more powerful figures. This is supported by the very low Assertiveness score. She seeks out authority figures to control her fears and insecurities (also supported by the high Duty score) - a self-deprecating form of loyalty. The high Role/Immersion score is probably a function of the moderate Aesthete score.