7 Essential Resources for Understanding Motivation...
Travis L. Ross on Apr 4, 2013Motivation is an important topic for game designers and social scientists. Many herald the ability of games to motivate players through incentive systems, by fulfilling intrinsic needs, capturing attention, or hooking into evolved motivational...
Using Psychophysiology in Games & Lunch with M...
Travis L. Ross on Mar 25, 2011While I was at GDC I had the opportunity to attend and talk by, and have lunch with, Valve Software’s Mike Ambinder. What became apparent from our conversation is that Valve and Mike are particularly interested in the application of...
Raid Encounter Difficulty: Why is “Hard Mode” Hard...
matthewfalk on Dec 1, 2010Welcome to December! Today's post serves as an introduction to an idea that I'll be expanding on in the future. One of the fundamental properties of games is that they don’t exist until someone makes them. I realize that this may seem like a “no...
How much choice do players really want?
Jim Cummings on Nov 8, 2010In his last post Matt discussed how players may modify different UI components so as to deal with the slew of motivationally relevant elements they encounter during complex and dynamic gameplay. This personalization of one’s interface allows the...
UI Modification, Cognitive Overload and Game Play
matthewfalk on Oct 29, 2010Welcome to the first Motivate.Play blog entry! Our plan is to post new content at a rate of about one entry per week. I’ve been lucky enough to be chosen to lead off, and so today I thought I’d write a think piece that may better explain the...