flickering colours » On Achievements: External Motivations

Videogames are a unique kind of game in that they can justify their own rule systems with fiction. Juul calls this coherence. An obvious task for this kind of fiction is motivating the player, which usually occurs by assuming an identification with the primary avatar, and motivating that character with fictional circumstances. Essentially, since the player is play-acting as the avatar, they take on that avatar’s motivations as their own. More traditional or classic games don’t bother. They take it as a given that they player wants to play, and say “If you want to play, then you’ll accept that this is winning and this is losing,” among other things. This is fine, this is how sports work: there is no objective reason for putting a ball through a hoop, we just do it because there are people over there trying to stop us doing it, and we want to show we’re better at this than they are!! The problem comes when we mix and match these kinds of motivating systems.

Fascinating stuff - never quite looked at the 'story' part of videogames from this angle before. That and lots more!