Ludotronics
Some things are too obvious to be perceived.
For the upper floor of my “motivational building” in my book Ludotronics, I combined the motivation model for work—autonomy, mastery, purpose—with self-determination theory or SDT, the motivation model for learning—autonomy, competence, relatedness—to a paradigm with four building blocks: autonomy/agency, mastery/performance, relatedness/community, and purpose/goal.
With regard to the SDT model, I wrote (pp.58–9):
[In SDT], purpose is missing. This has to do with a set of underlying—and indeed reasonable—assumptions that subordinate purpose to autonomy.
In a nutshell: according to the self-determination model, intrinsic aspirations and purposes are experienced as meaningful and promote well-being because they are products of autonomous decisions (driven by curiosity, creativity, enjoyment, the search for knowledge, and similar).
Now, while this is theoretically sound within its framework […] observations indicate that the absence of purpose might be the factor that causes expectations to fail when SDT is applied to game-based learning or game design in general (research pending).
The term “purpose,” both as an existing term in the work motivation model and as a lacuna in SDT, blinded me to what’s actually going on.
The logic that SDT indeed doesn’t have to make the element “purpose” explicit inside its framework naturally includes the element “goal.” And that can’t possibly work in games because the goal of a game—exceptions like self-set goals notwithstanding—is not the product of an autonomous decision by the player.
That’s it. That’s why SDT alone doesn’t quite work as a motivation model for games.
Which should have been obvious, to me as well as to other researchers who ran into the same or similar problems and wondered why SDT, when applied to game and game-based learning design, failed to meet expectations in their test setups for studies and papers.
If you have something valuable to add or some interesting point to discuss, I’ll be looking forward to meeting you at Mastodon!