Layers of Motivation

It never ceases to maze how diverse human motivation can be. Some people will happily spend hours slowly knitting a scarf or a sweather… knit… knit… knit… making a loop after loop after loop. Others will nerd out discussing nuances of various chess openings. Yet others will spend hours in tyring to make a record breaking speed run of a particular layer in their favourite platformer. What some people find fun others will find infinitelly boring and vice versa.

Motivation can be defined as our willingness to engage in a certain activity and willingness to persist with this activity until some goal has been reached.

When designing a game, we are quite often toying with this notion. What we are trying to do is to create an intricate system of goals and rules that will keep players motivated and engaged.

Player motivation is one of the key concepts in game design. Understanding what makes the player gravitate to a certain type of game is essential. The answer to this question is almost always very comples. Most games actually consist of several intricatelly interalced systems acting on various levels to maintain player’s motivation high.

In this text I will try to show an example which ilustrates exactly this, how different motivation layers can be stacked togather to create a compelling gameplay experience.

Theory

Before we devel deeper into paractial examples we will need to establish a common vocabulary. In my previous texts, I have already extensively written about Self Determination Theory, a psychological framework that I find particularly useful when discussing player motivation. I find this model particularly useful in my work as a game designer. In this text, I will give an example of how the learnings provided by this theory can be applied in practice.

If you are interested in a detailed discussion about SDT, you can take a look at some of my previous texts listed in the links section, or better yet, go directly to the source and read the book Glued to Games by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan or any of their numerous publications on this topic. I will give just a brief rundown of the basic tenets of this theory.

SDT is based on the idea that all humans share three essential psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Autonomy represents our need to be an active participant in our own lives, i.e., to have a conscious say in our own actions. Competence reflects our need to be in control of our own actions and to see the improvement in our skills. Relatedness is our inherent desire to be a part of a wider society of other human beings.

Building on these three psychological needs, the SDT discusses a spectrum of human motivations. In particular, it makes a clear distinction between two types of motivation that differ greatly in their quality. These are the intrinsic motivation originating in the activity itself and the extrinsic motivation, which relies on external means to maintain the player’s interest. The activity is intrinsically motivating if it fulfills one or more of the basic psychological needs to a great degree. This is what we actually mean when we say that something is fun. Extrinsic motivation in games represents all external reward systems that are meant to motivate the players to engage with something that they would not necessarily find fun.

Most games consist of several layers of various intrinsically and extrinsically motivating features to maintain the motivation level of their players.

Practice

To understand what this actually means, we need to take a look at a practical example. Take a look at the so-called Task Events that we have introduced to Hay Day in the summer of 2023. These are limited-time live service events. Each such event lasts about a week or two. During this time, players are expected to complete tasks that involve various activities on their virtual farms. If a task is completed successfully the player receives a certain amount of event points. Once the player collects enough points, let’s say 1000, a new reward is unlocked. The following reward is unlocked once the player reaches the next point milestone.

A screenshot of a task event in Hay Day.

These two parts of the system, the tasks and the rewards on the reward track, already constitute two distinct layers of motivation. The first layer, the task system, is intrinsically motivating. The activity of choosing and completing the tasks is fun for the players of Hay Day. The player can choose the order in which to do the tasks. In other words, the player has a great degree of autonomy over which task to do at which moment in time. Furthermore, as a lot of tasks require producing items that, in turn, require other items as ingredients, there is a significant amount of skill involved in strategizing in which order the player should do the available tasks. Doing the tasks feels fun and reading, i.e., intrinsically motivating because it allows the players to satisfy their two basic psychological needs, autonomy and competence.

Such as it is, this activity is fun for some people, and indeed to only some Hay Day players. It is obviously no fun for everyone. Furthermore, it is not necessarily fun in the long run. After a while, the player will learn the optimal strategies, and the level of satisfaction derived from learning new strategies gradually drops. In turn, this makes the feature satisfy the need for competence less and less.

The reward track added to the task events is an example of extrinsic motivation in practice. The player will persist with grinding those tasks in order to collect enough points in order to unlock the rewards, which are what the player actually wants. The SDT framework makes a distinction between a whole spectrum of extrinsic motivations, and this type of system represents an example of external regulation, i.e., an external system of reward unlocking regulates the player’s behavior within the context of completing tasks.

Motivation Continuum as defined by Sel-Determination Theory.

As mentioned earlier, the event is meant to last for several days. What happens if a player manages to collect all rewards before the end of this time? The system of external regulation is removed. There are no more rewards to chase! Something even more interesting happens. The activity of completing the tasks themselves, the very same one that we said is intrinsically motivating, ceases to be fun. Almost no one will continue to do those tasks once all rewards have been collected.

This is a well-known phenomenon. The extrinsic reward can overshadow and eliminate the intrinsic motivation! This seems counter-intuitive, but real life is full of such examples. Wikipedia, in its quality and the sheer quantity of articles, dwarfs all other encyclopedias, and it has been created entirely by unpaid individuals who have donated their time and energy without any material reward. The Internet, on which you are currently reading this text, relies on infrastructure built on top of a ton of open-source software built by volunteers, etc. Many psychological experiments confirm that the introduction of an extrinsic reward might negatively affect the intrinsic motivation to engage in the activity.

Now you may wonder why we even needed to include the extrinsic reward system into our feature in the first place. There are two clear reasons for this. The feature is intrinsically motivating to some players. The combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation makes it motivating for a much broader swath of our audience. It also makes it motivating for a much longer period of time. The problem arises from the finite nature of the system. There are just so many rewards that we can give. We also want all the participants in the task to feel able to reach all rewards. Therefore, we need to balance the difficulty of the tasks and point thresholds in order to be achievable with players with a relatively low level of skill and commitment. This pretty much ensures that the highly engaged players will collect all rewards much earlier than the rest.

In order to address some of these design shortcomings, we have introduced another system to our task events. We have attached a system of leaderboards with task events. These leaderboards follow the same general design outline that I have described earlier, see Building Better Leaderboards.

Players are divided into competition groups of several dozen. The players are ranked on the leaderboard based on the number of event points that they currently have. The leaderboard is updated whenever any player collects enough points to change position. As this happens very often, the system is very dynamic. At the end of the competition, players win rewards based on their leaderboard standing, the top ranking player taking the grand prize, the players in places 2 to 5 taking a bit smaller prize, the players below them yet another smaller prize, and so on.

A screenshot of a task event in Hay Day.

This leaderboard system ensures that players have a reason to continue competing until the actual end of the event. The system is much harsher for players, as the difficulty of obtaining a particular reward depends on the skill and effort of other players. While theoretically, all players can collect all rewards from the reward track, only one player in each competition group will be able to claim the grand prize. This is why we employed this system as secondary to the main reward track.

From the SDT point of view, this leaderboard system exhibits two distinct motivational layers. Both of these layers are extrinsic in nature but represent very distinct types of extrinsic motivations. This type of motivation is known as introjected motivation. It taps into the last psychological need, i.e., our need for relatedness with other humans. The leaderboard itself creates a hierarchy of participants in the competition group. It quite clearly states the relationship between each player to every other player in this group in the context of the skill and effort required to be successful in this competition. This is a very powerful driver! Whenever you create a leaderboard, people will try to climb it.

On the other hand, the rewards attached to the leaderboard constitute another layer of external regulation similar to track rewards.

Conclusion

In total, the system of task events and leaderboards consists of no less than four distinct motivational layers. These layers reinforce each other to create the complete gameplay experience.

Layers of motivation in Task Event system in Hay Day

The task events in Hay Day are just an illustrative example I have chosen simply because of my familiarity with them. However, very many other games include similar event systems that employ almost the same structure of motivation layers. See for example events in games such as Familly Island, etc.

Furthermore, this is just one combination of motivation layers. If you look cassrefully you will see that almost all video games have the similar structure of various motivation layers stacked up on top of each other and intertwined in between.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding player motivation is essential for good game design
• Self-Determination Theory is a psychological framework for understanding player motivation
• Motivation comes in two basic forms: intrinsic and extrinsic
• Intrinsic motivation is inherent to the activity itself, i.e., the activity is perceived as fun
• Extrinsic motivation is implemented via external reward (or punishment) systems
• Many features combine various layers of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
• Different motivation layers serve to support and augment each other

Links

• My previous text about Player Motivation — Player motivations: The carrot, the stick, and the holy grail
• My previous text about Building Better Leaderboards
• The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) whitepaper by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan
• selfdeterminationtheory.org — a website with a lot of SDT resources
• Glued to Games: How Video Games Draw Us In and Hold Us Spellbound, book by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan