Thursday, March 5, 2009

Motivation in games

I was reading an article by Kenny & Gunter about Intrinsic motivation and learning. I am trying to think about games and learning in relation to Chance's and Kohn's articles on rewards, extrinsic, and intrinsic motivation. Kenny & Gunter support that game designers must exploit the natural motivation that players/learners have by developing them to promote intrinsic motivation, content learning, transfer of knowledge, and naturalization. As learning scientists, we need to consider the learners' needs, and provide (or not) rewards that are effective for meaningful learning. Several studies that are mentioned in Chance's and Kohn's articles show that there are cases where rewards work for intrinsic motivation, but in some other situations, rewards do not work as we think they do.

The reference for the article is: Kenny, R. F. & Gunter, G. A. (2008) Endogenous fantasy-based serious games: Intrinsic motivation and learning. International journal of social sciences. Vol.2, No.1. pp. 8-13

2 comments:

  1. Kohn is completely against the use of rewards however he offers few practical suggestions for alternative strategies-particularly for game-based contexts. There are so many variables that one has to consider with rewards--individual differences (rewards vary across persons), the salience of the rewards, the context, timing, etc. so there are many things you have to consider. From what I'm learning about game-base environments it seems that rewards are inherent (and many times expected) within the game by the users. This is certainly a huge issue for us as we design our programs

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  2. I think that the players should not be playing only for the sake of playing, but because when striving to reach some goals, they are already inside the learning process. When trying to build up some "tactics" to have a faster/better outcome in the game and acquire some rewards, the players are indeed performing some kind of passive learning, mumbling upon ways to excel in the game versus other users. The real challenge for the designers is therefore to make the players so interested that they think think think and think, so that when they move away from the game they are either really satisfied by having reached the prefixed goals of their quest (Atlantis? :) ) or they feel frustrated by the need to find alternative ways to achieve the wanted results and therefore keep thinking back at the game itself. It is in this way that the players are not only actively involved in the game, but also passively gaining skills and knowledge. Please Maria brief me on this :)

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