Many Welps

I was tagged for this wonderful survey by MagiWasTaken over at Indiecator. I always find these types of things interesting even if they end up telling me things I already know. This particular one made me think less about why I play games (spoiler: they’re fun) and more about how I play games.

What are the Results? Share the link, headline and two motivation model graphs you received.

Without further ado, I present to you the Action-Oriented, Spontaneous, Relaxed, Social, and Creative gamer. Now say that ten times fast…

Primary Motivations

 

Secondary Motivations

 

How do you feel about your survey results?

Nothing surprises me from the primary motivations. If you would have given me a list of those motivations and told me to rank them you’d get the same result. Reading a little deeper into those motivations it seems like a list of answers to “How would your friends describe you?”

The secondary motivations were more interesting for me. Note the 72% in destruction. I don’t consider myself a destructive person. My immediate gut reaction was ” That’s weird I don’t go out of my way to destroy things in games.” But then I thought about it some more and I do tend to blow things up when I play with friends but not so much on my own. Which leaves me to wonder if how these motivations change when we’re talking about single player and multiplayer. There’s a blog post just waiting to happen…

Which Category is the Most and which one is the least accurate?

And the award for most accurate category goes to…Social (76%)!

Probably not much of a surprise there if you’ve been reading this blog lately. Most posts are revolve around some multiplayer experience. And that’s because the majority of my gaming time is spent with other people. Don’t get me wrong, I like single-player games and just finished a long one. But given the choice between playing a game by myself or with a friend nine times out of ten, I’ll opt to play with a friend.

The least accurate is going to be the Story sub category under Immersion. I would have expected to score higher. The story is one of those things that will keep me playing even if I don’t like the gameplay as much. Sometimes an interesting story is one thing I’ll go outside of my usual gaming comfort zones for. The Last Door for example.

Are there any major exceptions to your typical gaming motivations?

The way this survey defines achievement leads me to get a very low score. A) I’m not a completionist because that would drive me insane. B) I’m not a min maxer because that takes away some of my personal fun. But I feel like 16% for Achievement is low. I’d expect more of a score around 50%. I’m task-oriented so checking off boxes bring s me great joy.  I always have some sort of goal in mind when I’m playing a game. I’ll spend large chunks of my free time grinding for cosmetics.

Hey, wait a minute…

For gamers who score high on Design, this may mean collecting costumes and mounts in games like World of Warcraft.

I rest my case, Achievement should be higher than 18%.

Do any of these motivations carry over to your non-gaming life?

This is weird for me as I don’t really think of myself as a social person but I’d say the Social motivation as it’s described here motivates me in life as well. I love being part of a team, helping others to achieve goals, and doing stuff with friends. I get no enjoyment interacting with large groups of people in my free time but I’d rather hang out with a few of my good friends than be by myself most of the time

Which games in your experience best satisfy your gaming motivations and how do they compare to the suggested games list from the questionnaire’s follow up page?

I’ve played most of the games on the first page of the recommendations so I take that as a good sign. Warframe, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, Overwatch, Destiny. The one oddball there is Ark: Survival Evolved. I understand why it’s there, I have high creativity and action, so a base building game with dinosaurs and guns is a natural conclusion…The thing is, my creativity doesn’t go much farther than how my character looks and maybe some house decorating. The whole “let’s build a structure out of blocks/pieces” has never appealed to me.

If I take this as 100% accurate, this is what motivates me as a gamer, it would finally explain why I have 700 hours in Trove. It’s flashy and fast(Action), it’s multiplayer (Social), it’s got plenty of character customization (Creativity), and it’s not very hard (Mastery)!

 

Tag, You’re It

I don’t often do a lot of self-reflection so this ended up taking way longer to fill out than I thought.  If you see this and you’re like “Hey that looks like fun!” Consider yourself tagged. I’ll warn you though, I had this nagging feeling that I was doing a homework assignment filling out these questions.