There are many places we can illustrate the important role of intrinsic motivation empowering activities. We can look at intrinsic motivation in sports, we could look at its role in the classroom and in learning, we can look intrinsic motivation in hobbies and in leisure, we could be even looking at it in the workplace. But one of my favorite illustrations of the importance of intrinsic motivation and the principles of cognitive evaluation theory is research on video games. Now, everybody in this audience knows what a video game is. You've probably played some games before we have games that we play on our computers, we have games that we play on our mobile phones. Actually, video games had become very most popular entertainment industry and most profitable entertainment industry on the face of the earth, a really fast growing area of human occupation. So, we thought let's study video games and see what has people so motivated to play them. Our reasoning was that most video games have already figured out some of the secrets of human motivation. That video games have designers when they've designed a good game or a popular game, it already has in it many ingredients of feeding people sense of competence. You've played a video game before you know that most of the time it starts out pretty easy and you can get lots of positive feedback, and you're always leveling up in a video game. Unlike in life, video games makes sure you can have that feeling of success. Also video games often give you a sense of relatedness. They allow you to group with other people, cooperate with other people, chat with other people, connect with other people. So, relatedness is a big part of what makes a really good game fun, particularly the kind of games we might play on a platform or a computer. Finally, some of the best designed games in the world and the most popular games had been games that have a lot of autonomy built into them. A great example of that would be the famous game, World of Warcraft, which was for a long time the most popular game on the earth. It was an open war game in which people could choose what activities they were engaged in, what quests they set themselves upon, what kind of tasks that they would undertake and what kind of partners they would hook up within their guilds or rating teams. So, it had all the ingredients of competence autonomy and relatedness. So, we decided that we would see whether these the ingredients that made people want to play this game. So, we study people who just in the beginning of playing World of Warcraft, we had them play a session or two and then we had them rate how much autonomy, how much competence, how much related as they experienced while playing the game, as well as how much fun they had while playing the game? Then eight months later, we came back to those people to see who was still carrying their subscription to the game, who was still paying to play so to speak? We reasoned that if you're still playing eight month later, it's because you must find this game to be intrinsically motivating. As you can see in the numbers that I have before you, the highest correlates predicting whether people were playing eight months later, where their feelings of needs satisfaction of whether they are feeling autonomy and competence and relatedness in playing the game. This was much more powerful a predictor than for instance rating of fun or enjoyment. In fact, if you let fun and enjoyment compete in regression equations against the satisfaction of basic psychological needs, basic psychological needs explains all over variants to fun and enjoyment. In other words, is those basic needs satisfactions that make the game itself fun, and this is what predicts people playing eight months later. Now, even other experiments get it this much more deeply. For instance, Peng and her associates did a number of studies applying SDT to video games. They would take a video game that was basically an exercise game, a game where you might get some motor activity in while you're playing against the screen. In that game, they decided that they would take features that supported autonomy and turn them on or off and see how that affected fun of the game. For instance, in this game, you could design your own avatar, which is something we think enhances autonomy because you have a sense of choice about how the player looks that you're engaged within the game and what kind of character you're going to be playing. So, we think that personalization adds to the sense of autonomy. Then you simply turned on the feature where you can personalize your avatar or instead assigned people a same-sex avatar of their choosing and then had people play the game. Just having the choice over the avatar itself made the game more fun and people were more likely to persist at the game and find it enjoyable and willing to recommend it to others if that feature was on. Similarly, they took a feature that affected competence in the game itself. It was built so that after you conquered certain challenges, the game would automatically adjust what new tasks be set so that they would always be at an optimal challenge. They turn that feature off. They found that players who played with that feature on, found the game much more enjoyable and they had higher feelings of competence that mediated that increased enjoyment. Whereas players who didn't have that feature turned on, didn't feel as competent to the game and that led them to feel less enjoyment for the game itself. So, even features of games will affect whether there's autonomy satisfactions or competent satisfactions or related in satisfactions, and that's what drives the long-term persistence. So, video games had been a really interesting place for us to study intrinsic motivation. First, because they're so popular, but also because in games, we can look at the features and events that are associated with the enhancement of feelings some autonomy, competence, and relatedness and then have a causal impact on whether people sustain their engagement in those games or not. So, it becomes just a laboratory for studying human behavior as it would be understood even in more important than real-world contexts. The fact that video games are so intrinsically motivating also makes them a bit risky and dangerous for some people. Probably, all of you know that there are issues that are widely discussed publicly about video game addiction. What we in self-determination theory call, overuse. So, the over use of video games really comes about because people find that they need satisfaction in these games so dense and so immediate and so easy to get to that the games become very compelling. We decided that we would do some research on exactly who's most vulnerable to video game addiction. We have a mini-theory within our mini-theory of self-determination theory called "The Need Density Hypothesis." We hypothesized that games because they're so good at satisfying these basic psychological needs, are particularly strong and their gravitational pull for people who aren't getting those needs satisfied in other areas of their life. So, if you're the kid in school who doesn't feel really particularly effective or competent at school, or you're not really connected with classmates, or you don't feel a lot of autonomy in your daily life, then you're going to particularly find the virtual world supply by video games as intriguing places to be because there you'll be able to have those satisfactions denied to you in the rest of life. So, in fact, we argue that the lower your needs satisfaction in regular life, the higher the gravitational pull of video games because they deliver these things so easily. In fact, we found that people who are really vulnerable to video game overuse are exactly those people who are feeling deprived of basic psychological needs satisfaction in their homes, schools, and workplaces. Just to give you one concrete example of that. We interviewed a man who was really a strong video game overuser. He was playing 35 to 40 hours a week of video games while working his full-time job. When we asked him, "Why are these games so compelling to you?" He said, "Look, I've been on my job now for 20 years and I never level up. But I can go home every night and level up and feel effective." We can see right there the needs density hypothesis and operation, which is somebody who's not finding satisfactions in a real world can readily find them in a virtual world. Of course, what we want to do in self-determination theory is not undermine the joy of video games. We, in fact, I want to help design them to be as fun as possible, but we also want to find ways to bring need satisfaction into that man's workplace, into those students school rooms, into homes, so that people can have need satisfaction both in and out of their virtual world.
