Thesis Reflection – Targeting Specific Audience with the Right Methods

Jon Radoff

Jon Radoff (2012) talks about Game Play Motivation as what makes a player interested in a game.

Radoff (2012) says that You have to understand much more than conditioning to build a relationship of the player towards a game. He explains how Skinner made his early experiments based on pigeons and later on rats, but humans are much more different from that because we come from a different eco system.

Bartle’s taxonomy is being and had been used even where it does not apply which Bartle himself agrees with, therefore Radoff (2012) has rethought the player types into motivations.

Achievement

Achievement is about learning a skill and then get to practice that skill giving the player the understanding if they are getting better or worse. Yet the game must be a balance in difficulty versus the player’s skill (Radoff, 2012).

Radoff (2012) explains this by the theory of flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2004) which in brief; you enter flow when your skill is high and the challenge is high as well. Here the person has a balance between his skill and his challenge, they will not get bored because the challenge is high enough while still not getting worried because also their skill is high.

Immersion

Radoff says that a person is immersed in a game by: storytelling, practicing theory of mind, adopting new viewpoints, imagining cause of effect, recognising patterns, appreciating beauty. It is all about experiences and letting the player relate with those experiences.

Story adds a lot to immersion. Let’s imagen removing the story from Farmville (Zynga, 2009) and the gameplay would be just placing tiles on a plane, the game would be boring and people would not engage that much, but since it has nursery, growing, animals and plants it is much more engaging and keeps the player wanting more (Radoff, 2012).

Cooperation

Cooperation is: altruism, coordination, coalition-building and grouping. Socialisation is important in immersion because people love to share stories with each other and in achievement people can demonstrate their skill to others (Radoff, 2012).

Competition

Competition is the player seeking for: attention, resources, recognition, physical domination, mates and other. As humans, it is important for us to have a role model, a leader who exemplifies certain roles in our society, so that we can try to emulate their skill from them and try to be more like them. Therefore, competition in a game can be used to create those role models for other players (Radoff, 2012).

From these studies, I learned a lot on how one should approach in game design in order to engage a specific set of audiences. To full fill what I want to achieve, it is important that the game is interesting and engaging to every student. You cannot risk in leaving someone behind. Therefore, this study on different personalities and player types while playing will help me out in carrying such task based on studies and theories which are proven to work.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2004. Flow, the secret to happiness. [Online] Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow#t-69654 [Accessed 16 December 2016].

Radoff, J., 2012. GSummit NYC 2011: Jon Radoff - Designing for User Motivation. [Online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I79icpye_PQ [Accessed 16 December 2016].