What do you mean when you say fun?

“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion” — P. De Vries

Why do people play games? Well, that’s easy… Games are fun!

I still clearly remember one lunch break from couple of years ago that I spent going for a Pokémon GO raid. It was wintertime in downtown Helsinki, Finland. The weather that day was -7°C (that is 19F in US) with gusts of strong wind and snowfall. I was sure that I’d be alone, but as the scheduled start of the raid was approaching a small throng of people started forming. By the time raid started there were about twenty of us, all middle-aged office workers, from nearby buildings, spending our lunchtime chasing virtual monsters in the middle of a blizzard. In the end, I didn’t even catch that legendary Pokémon I was after, but I had fun!

People do lots of stuff ‘cos they are fun. Some people think that it’s fun to shoot clay pigeons. Others get a kick out of collecting ancient postage stamps. Some people spend nights bent over arcane rulebooks rolling twenty-sided dice. To millions playing video games means milking virtual cows to produce virtual cheese and donuts in Township. Others scoff at such pedestrian trivialities and instead opt to play-act their fantasies of being a Witcher.

Well, what do games as diverse as Overwatch, Tetris, Township, or Among Us actually have in common? What makes all of these diverse bits of software into successful games? …and what is fun anyway?

The definition of fun is a slippery one. It falls into that weird category of concepts that are easy to recognize, but hard to express with words. There is a considerable body of work published on this topic. What I find helpful is to break this troublesome notion into a more manageable parts. Something that we can define more precisely and put into words more easily.

Enter Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a psychological framework that can help us in this undertaking. Brace yourselves! This is going to go deep.

This theory has been originally developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard Ryan in the 1980s. Since then it has been applied a diverse areas of human activity including wellness and wellbeing, sports performance, workplace performance, and job satisfaction, to name but a few.

It was applied to the study of games by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan via their The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) Model.

The Self-Determination Theory speaks about human needs, building on the idea of the hierarchy of human needs proposed by Maslow in his Self-Actualization Theory.

KEY IDEA: All human beings share the same inherent psychological needs!

It postulates that all humans share a set of, at least, three basic psychological needs:

• Autonomy,
• Mastery,
• Relatedness.

All humans seek out the satisfaction of those needs, in the same way we require air, water, food, or shelter to satisfy our basic physiological needs. Humans will naturally gravitate towards activities that offer more chances for the need satisfaction. There is a sizable body of psychological research that confirms that this behavior is universal regardless of the age, gender, or culture to which any particular person might belong.

Obviously, some human activities are better at satisfying these than others. An hour spent stuck in a traffic jam is not really doing wonders for either our sense of autonomy nor competence, quite the contrary. On the other hand, video games are actually designed in such a way, to offer psychological need satisfaction in spades.

So what do you do, when you are stuck in that traffic jam? Well, of course, you reach for your cell phone and start chatting with friends to fill in your acute shortage of Relatedness, or start playing a game to do the same for Autonomy and Competence.

This is what fun means. It’s an activity that helps us to satisfy the three basic psychological needs!

KEY IDEA: People play games cos they offer a great degree of need satisfaction.

A well designed game will afford for the satisfaction of one of the three basic needs to an extremely high degree or at least two of those to a great degree. Truly successful games will offer satisfaction of all three needs to a very great degree.

To fully understand what this actually means, we should take a look at more precise definitions of these three needs as seen in the context of Self-Determination Theory.

Autonomy

As a term, Autonomy is a instantly recognizable. In everyday speech it is often used as a synonym to words such as freedom, liberty, or independence. However, the SDT uses a very specific and relatively narrow definition of autonomy:

• Autonomy is a desire to be causal agents of one’s own life and act in harmony with one’s integrated self.

This narrower definition of Autonomy actually excludes quite a few of common associations. Specifically, in this context Autonomy is not freedom in a general sense. Freedom is absence of constraints. In the SDT framework, autonomy means that we act with awareness of external constraints. Furthermore, Autonomy does not imply lack of demands. Rather it is a response to the demands. It does not mean individualism. Autonomy as a need, is evident even in cultures that are not individualistic in nature. Finally, Autonomy is not equal to independence, in the sense that one acts alone. We can act autonomously and still rely on help and guidance of others.

Even in this narrow sense Autonomy is still a relevant human psychological need. Denial of autonomy is why slavery or incarceration feel so bad. It is also the reason why your two-year-old throws a temper tantrum when you try to interrupt his play in the sandbox.

In contrast to many other media, video games offer a great degree of Autonomy to players. While watching a movie or reading a book, we are passive observers. We might be immersed in the story, but we are not affecting its narrative. Games are interactive by nature. In games, we are the hero of the story. We get to take control over the character and get to make meaningful choices. The player gets to decide which goals to pursue and how to pursue them.

Even the games of chance, where the outcome depends purely on randomness, always employ some means by which the player can have an illusion of control. The act of blowing on the dice before throwing them, is an act of asserting Autonomy!

Competence

The second psychological need defined by SDT is centered on what we tend to refer to as skill. It revolves around our desire to control the outcome of our own actions. We have the inherent need to see our actions produce the intended results.

Consider a simple act of throwing a basketball. Before every action comes a moment of intention. Before ordering the muscles to contract and release the ball, our brain forms a mental model of the trajectory he wants expects the ball to follow. If the result of our action produces the desired result we feel the satisfaction. If, like most times when I throw the ball, the outcome ends up to be something random, we feel frustration.

Furthermore, we have a desire to see our games improve based on the observed feedback. The denial of this aspect of Competence is the reason why dead-end jobs can feel so soul-crushing.

The concept of Competence transcends simple physical actions. It applies to our general desire to achieve our goals, or to at least get closer to goals with each action we take.

As we have already noted, games are by definition interactive. In the context of games competence is tied to the player’s ability to reach the goals using means at his disposal. In this sense, it is closely tied to the concept of Flow popularized by Csíkszentmihályi.

Keep in mind that skills in games can reside on multiple levels. In some games, for example, arcade beat-em-ups, it can be related to dexterity, speed of reflexes, and mastery of controls. In others, such as city builders or turn-based strategies, it is about strategic planning and managing resources. Many games require a mix of several skills. Multiplayer First Person Shooter (FPS) games require a mix of dexterity and tactical thinking. In other games skill can be all about social interaction: Game of Poker or recently popular Among Us hinge on the ability to read minimalistic cues to discern intentions of other players.

Even in the case of games of chance, players have a tendency to attribute success to their skill, whatever that might be, and failure to bad luck or systemic bias.

Relatedness

Humans are social beings. We evolved through an evolutionary strategy that required group action and interaction. We are meant to be embedded into a social matrix consisting of other human beings. This desire to be connected in some way to other human beings, defines our need for Relatedness.

However, this concept is multifaceted. On one hand, we have a deep-seated desire to belong to a group, to feel loved and cared for. On the other hand, we also feel a need to establish our place within the group. To evaluate our skills and social standing in reference to other people with which we come into contact.

The unfulfilled desire for relatedness is why solitary confinement is one of the harshest punishments.

Playing board games with your friends, be it as simple as Kimble, or as complex as AD&D, is rooted in the desire to satisfy our need for Relatedness.

There are many ways how video games satisfy this need. Since the beginning video games offered a chance of playing against friends sitting on a sofa. Atari’s Pong, one of the earliest games, was a multiplayer game. Even without multiplayer mode arcade machines of the 80s offered a chance to put a three-letter abbreviation on the leaderboard. This rudimentary mechanism was a motivator enough for millions of players.

Many modern games are built around the idea of multiplayer gameplay, FPS, and MMO genres in particular. Others have it in metagame level via various social features, such as clubs, guilds, clans, etc. Even the most casual games have features aimed to satisfy the need for Relatedness. The success of saga map metagame design, made popular by King and its Candy Crush series, is in a good part thanks to Facebook friends’ avatars shown scattered along the path. This simple hint is enough to help us establish our place in the relative order of our friends. It is a tiny little social matrix for us to feel embedded into.

Even if the game itself doesn’t provide means to address relatedness, some of its fans will start to congregate on social media, Reddit pages, and forums to discuss strategies, compare experiences and simply socialize around the common topic.

Key takeaways

• People have inherent psychological needs. People seek out activities that offer satisfaction in the same way they require air, water, food or shelter to satisfy physical needs. Some human activities offer better satisfaction of needs than others.
• Autonomy is our need to be causal agents in our own life.
• Competence is our desire to control the outcome of our actions and to feel our skills improve.
• Relatedness is our need to be a part of a group of other human beings, be loved, respected and cared for, but also to understand our place within the social group.
• People play games because they offer a great chance of satisfaction of these needs. A successful game needs to either satisfy one of these needs very much or a combination of several of these. Truly great games offer all three to a great degree.

Bonus

Benevolence — a potential 4th basic psychological need.

Bonus

The Feather Heist - a sneak peek into an incredible and exciting world of Victorian fishing lures and people who will go to great lengths to recreate them. Even break the law.

Links

• The Player Experience of Need Satisfaction (PENS) whitepaper by Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan
• Immersyve a game design consultancy company co-founded by Scott Rigby
• selfdeterminationtheory.org — a website with a lot of SDT resources
• Pursuit of Happiness — the Theory of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi