Explore the theories the games And
Using theories in Games to make
working and studying more naturally
Yide Xie
University of Birmingham
[email protected]
March 9, 2017
Abstract
This paper conclude the 6 main rules in designing games.By going through these rules, I found several basic
theories used widely in games. Flow theory and malsow?s human need model was illustrated then. Showing
two researcher’s work, one is using gamer’s abilities for solving problems to make contributions to the real
world, another is the core drives that influence our behavior. By Combining two researchers’ work, put
forward some simple ways to change the way we studying or working.
Key words: games, design, flow theory, Maslow human need model, gamification , playing
I.
Introduction
ogy such as Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow theory [3],
anthropology, game theory and fun theory.
Then comes the literature review that conclude
others experiments about human interaction
with games and list the weakness and strength
of others work. And at the fourth section the
I will show how we can combine our work or
study with games in three aspects:
rom ancient times to the present, human
beings play games. A running contest or a
virtual reality game can been known as games.
Due to the technological development, a simple
fact currently is that productivity is liberated.
So people have more time for entertainment.
And nowadays some games are very popular
and has been developed and changed into electronic sports. But why we like playing games
rather than working or studying ? There are
many elements in a game are designed to make
us have a good experience when playing games.
So the purpose of this article is to investigate
how these elements influent players’ behavior
and discover the theories in games that interact
with players.
F
• Start on work, Motivation
• Concentrate on work, Generate heart flow
• Add some fun, Working environment
Then comes the discussion and conclusion.And
the last part is the references.
II.
Game and game design
Basically, a game (including the outdoor games
such as hide-and-seek) is a large system that
contains anthropology, psychology, design science, game theory, and fun theory. And for
video games or VR games which are very
The structure of the paper is as follows. In
the second section there is a introduction about
games and game design.Then I introduced the
theories applied in games including psychol1
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popular today the system can be much larger.
Animation, Architecture, Brainstorming, economics, business, Cinematography, Creative
writing, history, music, visual arts, engineering, Public speaking, Mathmatics etc. [13] all
these subject has been applied in games.
i.
The Definition of Game
In order to investigate the theories behind
games, we need to be clear about what is a
game.There are many people has defined what
is a game. Intuitively we can define the game
like this: things that we can play. But this definition is not informative. When we are playing
games there are many factors can influence the
way we interact with games.
said by J. Barnard Gilmore [13]. These definitions has illustrate part of the games. Figure 1
shows a screen shot of an typical video game
and this picture can show the features about a
game.
We can see that although the interface of
these two games are totally different, there still
be something similar abstractly. The features
can be summarized as follows.
• feature1: They all have a goal(or goals) to
achieve.(The required score of this level
and the boss)
• feature2: They all have conflicts
• feature3: There will be an end of each
game(you lose or you win)
• feature4: Players all have rules to obey
• feature5: The progress is a kind of challenge.(from easy to hard)
• feature6: They all give feedbacks immediately
• feature7: They are all closed and formal
systems and players need to interact with
the system.
• feature8: players are willing to play them
And there is a really clear definition made
by Jesse Schell, he said "A game is a problemsolving activity." [13]. I love this definition,
here are some reasons.
figure1:two different types of game
Friedrich Schiller said that, "Play is the aimless
expenditure of exuberant energy." And "Play
refers to those activities which are accompanied by a state of comparative pleasure, exhilaration, power, and the feeling of self-initiative."
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• This definition illustrate the core of every game. No matter what kind of game
we are playing, we all have problems designed by the game designer. Take tetris
as an instance, the problem we are solving in this game is organizing the blocks
in different shapes to make them fit each
other perfectly. Even a simple game has a
specific problem to solve, no matter those
games who has clear levels.
• This definition shows a possibility to regard working as a game. There are different types of works or occupations, and
the works which is a process of solving
problems is similar to games in some aspects. By detecting the theories behind
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a game and apply them into our work is
may make work more enjoyable.
in this article, the area of games I am considering is limited in the games that operating on
some interactable devices such as smartphone
games, video games and VR games.
ii.
Game Design
Knowing how to design an attractive game will
be helpful for us to discover the factors that
make a problem-solving activity interesting.
By reading other’s works I find that there are
some important principals for game designing.
They are listed as follow and I will do explain
for each rule.
But design a successful game is a very complex
thing and need a lot experience. There also will
be many conflicts waiting for balance. There is
no golden rules to design a good game.
ii.1
The audience also need to be clear. Abstractly the main audience of smartphone
games is designed for those who has a device,
has some dominance of money and the time
they play games is fragmented. If designer
know who are going to play and like the game,
the game can be designed more targeted. And
by satisfying their needs, better game can be
created. According to Andrzej Marczewski?s
player type framework, players in game can be
divided into 6 groups. Figure 2 shows this 6
group and the characters of these classifications
of players.
Rule No.1: Be clear and simple
Every good game has their intrinsic value. For
example, Super Mario, which is one of the most
famous game in the world, has a very positive
intrinsic value. The story is very simple, an
ordinary plumber for love overcome the difficulties and defeat the monster. The value here
is heroism and love. The excitations is very
simple but strong.
The game should also have a clear main
theme. In Super Mario, we need to play Mario
to break through the obstacles and save the
princess caught by the monster. This main
theme runs through the whole process of the
game. And we can see nearly all the other elements are designed to strengthen the main
theme. The environment changed from outside to the inner of the monster?s castle, the
shortcuts ? and so on.
And we need to have a specific goal to
achieve. For each level the final goal is get
to the end of this map and going to the next
level. It is very clear and easy to understand.
figure2: Marczewski’s Player and User Types
Hexad [14]
This model was developed from Bartle’s player
types classification. There are killers, achievers, socializers and explorers. the types can
be more detailed if we consider more things.
For different types of players we need to have
different strategies to design or organize the
game. The Fugure 2 illustrate what kind of fun
should the designers set for players. Also we
can classify the players by there age or gender.
The age scale can be "0-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-14, 15-18,
19-24, 25-35, 35-50, 50+ ". Each level has its
own preference to games. While playing video
games males prefer violence while females pre3
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fer social. [12] So be clear about the audience
is important.
The world in a game should also be simple
and clear. We prefer a simple world and in the
world we have strong abilities. Take famous
basketball game 2K as an example. Why some
people prefer play basketball on a TV instead
of playing outside? I thing the reasons can be
: 1.the world is simple, they don’t need to pay
attention on other things such as weather or
conflict with others. 2.They have strong ability
in the game world, they can do slam dunk or
3-points shoot.
Finally the rules should be clear.
ii.2
Rule No.2: Be fun
The game must be interesting and people can
get fun from the game.According to Leblanc,
the pleasure in games can be classify into
eight types. They are sensation-game as
sense pleasure, fantasy-game as make believe,
narrative-game as drama, challenge-game as
obstacle course, fellowship-game as social
framework, discovery-game as uncharted territory, expression-game as self discovery and
submission-game as pastime. [5]
We can discover the pleasure from these aspects. Human brain is complex and we don’t
know what is the trigger to make us feel pleasure. But there are some specific scenes and
activities can make human enjoyable. Here are
some instance:
• Looking forward to something and be satisfied.
• Give gifts to others and receive gifts from
others and surprise
• The right to choose freely
• Be proud of our own?s achievement
• Clean something or clear an area
• Victory in adversity
• Conquer and vent
• ......
So a successful game can think about what will
make player feel pleasure and keeping attract
player’s attention.
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ii.3
Rule No.3: Be fair and balanced
Once a game is unfair or un balanced, the
player will leave quickly. And there are many
aspects should be designed balanced. Meantime there will be paradoxes in games, for example the difficulty and A the sense of accomplishment, harder the game is, more accomplishment the player will get after success. One
game can?t consider all the things perfectly. We
can consider the balance from these aspects.
• 1.Fairness. It is easy to understand, as a
player I will the game will be fair. Mora
is a good example to illustrate this point.
Scissors can cut paper, rock can break scissors and paper can "swallow" rock. No
one is the best or the worst. By the way,
this game is still popular today.
• 2.Challenge. The challenge should be
achievable, if the enemy is too strong
to defeat, I think no one will continue
playing this game unless the player is
masocherism. So the challenge should be
designed proper. And it depends on the
game style. There is a successful action
adventure game in 2016 called "Dark Soul
3." In this game the enemies is very powerful and can kill the player at one second,
and if the player died they will lose the
soul the gathered before. It is very unfriendly especially for novice. But the is
still very good. Table 1 shows the score
of Dark Soul 3 given by the mainstream
game media. The reason is although the
game is hard but when the player defeat a
boss or finish a map successfully, they will
get a great sense of accomplishment. So
the challenge should be balanced but not
unachievable.
• 3.Choices During a game.Players will face
many choices. So what the designer
should do is to make the choices meaningful. If the player are trying to buy a
car in game, one type is better than any
other types and the price is similar, the
game will be boring. According to Game
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Table 1: Score of Dark Soul 3
game media
score
IGN
GameSpot
Pc Gamer UK
Game Informer1
9.5/10
8/10
94/100
9.3/10
theory, this is called advantage strategy
which should be avoided. Figure 3 shows
a common strategy for choice design. It is
also related to the sense of freedom and
control in game. How many choice we can
make? Or just go with the fixed scenes.
tween these two factors is also important.
• 6.Vs and cooperation. Competition and
cooperation are basic, animal urges. All
higher animals are driven to compete
against others partly for survival, and
partly to establish their status in the community. Opposite of that, there is also a basic instinct to cooperate with others, since
a team, with its many eyes and hands, and
its diverse abilities, is always more powerful than an individual. [13]
• 7. Details and imagination. In the game
world people can’t build anything. Many
parts are high-level abstract. And it need
us to imagine. But there is some thing
need to be designed in details, especially
related to the core experience. If we are
playing a fighting game, the background
is abstract, the trees may be just a fixed
picture. But the rivals or enemies must be
designed in detail.
ii.4
Rule No.4: Feedback
It is important to give players feedback directly. People like to see something is changing,
getting feedback quickly can enhance the selfawareness and motivate player keep on doing
something. Feedback include reward and punishment. Reward can be single or multiple, and
basically they are:
figure 3: Choice design – reward and
risk [13]
• 4.Probability. This means that the probabilities in games should be balanced. If I
want to find a treasure under the sea. The
treasure appear randomly. The probability
become important, too easy or too hard
will break the experience of the game.
• 5.Thinking and opreating. In a game sometimes the player need to think(read the
map or make a plan)and some times they
need to operate the device(move the character or waving sword). The balance be-
• Praise. Such as some hints "Cool!", "Well
done!", "Congratulations!"
• Scores.
• Extension of game time. For example in
Super Mario when you collect 100 coins,
you can be rewarded an extra life.
• The entrance to somewhere new.
• Wonders.
• Chance to show themselves. In some versus based games the winner can show on
the screen at the end.
• Development of abilities.
Level up,
strength + 1....things like this
• Resources
• Achievement
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And we can infer the punishment from reward.
III.
Foundation theories
flow. This can tell us an important information
that we can generate flow if our ability can
match the task.
From the analysis of principles in game designing, we can be informed something important.
Here is a question: we like playing games or we
just like the feeling when we playing a game.
Game is the carrier of feeling. And in this section I am going to discover the theories about
what makes the games attractive and why.
i.
Flow in Games
The flow theory which is nearly used in all the
video games. It was discovered by Csikszentmihalyi. In positive psychology, flow, also known
as the zone, is the mental state of operation in
which a person performing an activity is fully
immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full
involvement, and enjoyment in the process of
the activity. In essence, flow is characterized
by complete absorption in what one does. [15]
figure 4: Csikszentmihaly ’s flow theory. [4]
Figure 4 show the main concept of flow theory.
So we can see the main point of maintain a flow
state is to keep a balance between challenges
and abilities. and Figure 5 shows the channel of
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figure 5: Flow channel [1]
The phenomenology of Flow has eight major
components.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
A challenge activity that requires skills
The merging of action and awareness
Clear goals
Direct feedback
Concentration on the task at hand
The sense of control
The loss of self-consciousness
The transformation of time [1]
By playing games people can get flow state
easily, And flow is one of the reasons people
playing games, it brings happiness. [11] Game
is the carrier of feeling, so in order to get the
delightful feeling, we play games through intrinsic motivation. This motivation is the condition of create flow. [6] In games especial video
games, it is much easier to build an world that
can help players know the level of abilities and
tasks. And the balance between challenge level
and skill level can be adjusted closer to anxiety zone or relaxation zone. In this way the
game will be divided to hardcore game and relaxation game. Designer using flow principles
into their project to create enjoyable experience
for players. [1]
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And now the flow in games has been linked
to education. There is a game call "Dragon
Egg", it is a math learning game. Only the
surrounding is clear, the egg will hatch. And
the way to clear the weed or something is solve
equations.
ii.
But there are individual differences and in different culture, for example individualism and
collectivism may have different sprite needs.
Anyway consider the way these two theories
applied in games, we can go deeper about how
to make change to our life.
IV.
Hierarchy of needs
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a model that
conclude the human’s need in an 6-layer pyramid. Figure 6 show the structure of human’s
need.
With the development of video games, the research in this area gain more and more attention. In this part I will show some researcher?s
work and analysis the strength and weakness
in their work. And there are two people has
made impressive achievement about game and
our life. They are Jane McGonigal and Yu-kai
Chou.
i.
figure 6: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. [7]
The picture shows clear about what the levels
are.
iii.
Stage summary
There are still many theories or studies used in
games and I can’t listed them all here. These
two theories I mentioned above is classic. For
flow theory, the strength is we can be informed
about the relation between human’s feeling
and the level of challenges and skills. But the
weakness is this model shows a little about human’s internal motivation. And for Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs model, the strength is this
model provide a clear structure of human
needs and in games we can find these needs
has been used as mechanism of some games.
What has people done with
this?
Using games to solve problems
This thought was put forward by Jane McGonigal, an American game designer. She is trying
to let people solve problems in real life as easy
as player solve problems in games. The way
to approach this idea is to design the games
puzzles based on the real problem in our life.
People all over the world play spend 3 billion
hours on playing games. By an investigation
from Carnegie Mellon University, in a country
with strong atmosphere such as Japan, people
spend nearly 10000 hours on gaming before
21 years old.The time is equal to the hours
that they learn everything from school. And
I believe most of us know the "10000 hours to
success" theory, so what have the gamers learn
or what are they good at? Jane think there are
four main aspect that the gamers developed
while playing games.
• 1 Urgent optimism. Gamers have strong
willing to success, and are optimism. They
challenge and fail again and again but
hardly feel frustrated.
• 2 Social fabric. Gamers trust each other,
and are willing to cooperation. They have
same goal and the division of labor is clear.
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• 3 Blissful productivity. Gamer will generate flow while playing.
• 4 epic meaning. Gamers believe they can
make the change to the world(obviously,
the virtual world). [10]
So game is an ideal platform for people to
solve problem together. And gamer are superempowered hopeful individuals with huge potential to change the real world. [8]
Jane designed some interesting games. One
of them is a game called "world without
oil"(see figure 7) that people in a virtual world,
and the oil is almost run out. So players need
to do many things without oil. And save oil
in various ways. By tracing the players they
found that most of the players bring the oilsaving-habit into the real life. This is the way
how we can change the world by game. Because gamers has spending so much time on
solving problems. They are good at it. [9]
figure 7: Game: world without oil.
The strength is obvious. By this way gamers
are no longer the guy who has pizza on their
T-shirt and wearing a glass and sitting in front
of the screen whole day. They become an huge
productive forces. The large amount of people,
experts on solving different kinds of problem
actually, plus good cooperation environment,
I can hardly imagine there are some problems
can not be solved.
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Although it is a powerful and idea, but we
can not ignore it’s weakness. The weakness is
highly concentrated. It is how can the designer
transfer the real problem into games successfully. It is very hard because we can not contain
all the factors. What’s more, if a game?s goal is
eliminate obesity I don’t know it is attractive or
not. Player may not interested in and leave. So
transfer the problem is so hard. It is the main
weakness of Jane’s work.
ii.
Gamification
Yu-kai Chou is an Author and International
Keynote Speaker on Gamification and Behavioral Design. He is the Original Creator of the
Behavior Framework: Octalysis. Chou combine life and game in another way which is
contrary to Janes. Chou using gamification to
make life more like a game. In other words, we
are playing life.
Gamification is design that places the most
emphasis on human motivation in the process.
In essence, it is Human-Focused Design (as opposed to ?function-focused design?). [2] Chou
build a behavior framework: Octalysis. Figure
8 shows the Octalysis. I think the Octalysis is
based on the Maslow’s human need model. It
shows what are the core drives in games will
motivate us to do something.
The most famous online game is World of
Warcraft(WOW). Blizzard(An entertainment
company) operate this game and by their calculation, up to 2010 people on the earth have
spent 5.93 million years on WOW. And 5.93
years ago we human just start walking upright.
So I will use WOW as an example to illustrate
chou’s model.
The first one is Epic Meaning and Calling. In
the WOW, we create a character, the character
has some intrinsic labels. We need to decide
to be a Horde or an Alliance. And they are
antagonistic. So once the character has been
build we will have a epic meaning: defeat the
rivals. And when we defeat a boss, which is a
epic win, the game will tell you that you have
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figure 8: Octalysis. [2]
saved the world.
Accomplishment and Development is easy
to understand. Once we finish a task(the task
match the character’s level perfectly), we will
get experience, reward, items.... And by accumulating enough experience, the character
will level up. Not only the character, the level
of skills, the equipment will develop with the
character. Considering Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback with Development, every
little progress players has made will be seen
clearly and the system make feedback immediately. And in this virtual world players will
have virtual equipment and items. Some of
them is precious and very hard to get and. This
is also a drive for players called Ownership and
Possession. For example, the only way to get
one powerful sword is to kill the boss so many
times until the sword appear. This lead to
next point, Curiosity and Unpredictability. The
thing about character’s development is certain,
but the outside environment is unpredictable.
People in WOW also establish unions to help
each other. The core drive here is Social Influence and Relatedness. Scarcity and Impatience
and Loss and Avoidance is also obvious, we
will try our best to avoid death due to the punishment. There are close connection between
this core drives and players are drived to login
in to this virtual world once and once again.
Back to the framework, the left 3 drives is
extrinsic tendency. These factors motivate or
influence our behavior from outside.
• Accomplishment and Development
• Ownership and Possession
• Scarcity and Impatience
The right 3 elements is intrinsic tendency.
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• Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback
• Social Influence and Relatedness
• Curiosity and Unpredictability
Or from another aspect, the 3 elements is white
hat tendency. White hat means these factors
are positive.They can bring joy and happiness.
• Accomplishment and Development
• Epic Meaning and Calling
• Empowerment of Creativity and Feedback
And the 3 below is black hat tendency. Black
hat means the dirves is negative, it will bring
some bad emotion but we still be forced to do
something.
• Scarcity and Impatience
• Loss and Avoidance
• Curiosity and Unpredictability
Chou also provide an tool for people to analysis a project from this model.
Chou’s model illustrate the motivation
clearly. And by knowing these core drives,
we can analysis the things in life that we are
not eager to do. Using chou’s tool I analysis
the study process. See figure 9.
We can easily know the drive power of the
thing we want to analysis. Based on that we
can make improvements to raise the power of
drive force. [?]This is an approach to make the
world more closer to a game.
V.
proposal
My aim is to make the work or study more
attractive. And by the analysis of study using
Octalysis tool, I know there are some aspect
that we can improve. First step: We need to
overcome the frustrations. Study is a process
that we are get something new which means
is hard and a challenge. So the abilities here is
the ability to adjust our mood and keeping on
study instead of the intelligence.
Then we need to build the sense of achievement. Set a clear and meaningful goal is helpful. Short-term goal can feedback more frequency and raise the scores in the aspect of
empowerment of creativity and feedback. Not
only the inner side of our heart, due to the
mechanism of our brain, we need reward physically. Once we have achieve something, reward
ourself and there are many way to do this. We
can design the reward system for ourselves
using the ways designers using in games.
Study things that can benefit you. The extrinsic stimulates are strong.
Maintaince = M2 + A3 + C4 + T 5
(1)
Finally, find the epic meaning is important.
Those who keep on working or studying has
a epic meaning in their mind. They love what
they are doing. Why someone can not keep
working or study? Because many of us doing
the job or study for money. It is a strong force
but not the core of our life. But this is an
another topic.
2 Motivation
3 Ability
4 appropriate
figure 9: analysis study by Octalysis Tool
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5 trigger
challenges
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In my opinion, we can combine two approaches together. Using the Octalysis to find
out the aspects that need to be improved to
give people a stronger driven force. And then
design this problem as an game, using the intelligence from gamers to solve the problems.
VI.
Discussion
The summaries about games and the rules of
game designing shows the way to make a attractive game. Analysing these rules, I found
that flow theory and Maslow’s need model
make a great contribution to game designing.
Using these theories there are some talented
researchers trying to use the power of games to
change the way we live or solve the problems
in our real life.
It is hard to proof pf the concept of the studies like this. But we can do some further evaluations. Doing experiments or making questionnaires to survey the feeling after design there
work or study like a game.
The hardest thing is making such kind of
game interesting. And the game is the carrier
of feelings. For further research I think the find
the instinct relation between games and players may be worthy. Making study and work
conform to human?s nature can be potential
References
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[4] Csikszentmihalyi Flow. The psychology
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[15] Wikipedia. Flow-wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 2009. [Online; accessed 28-Fed2017].
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