Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs

I read "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs" while developing my own MUD and it seemed _very_ applicable. Both from a gamer and a developer perspective. I'm not sure the FA's reference to that paper makes it necessarily bad.

jblz2• 9 years ago

I don't think your criticism is very obvious. Can you elaborate?

The Bartle Test is a pretty common tool / consideration in gaming psych & gamified interfaces.

Density3• 9 years ago

I personally have no issue with the test. Players have different preferences when it comes to video games.

What I have a problem with is researchers attempting to drawn a relationship between video game preferences and basic needs. To me this reeks of Jack Thompson.

0xcde4c3db• 9 years ago

I can't speak for Density, but systems that divide people into discrete types are almost always bullshit. At best there's still a small minority who don't actually fit into any type, even roughly (unless the "types" are just a quantized version of a measured dimension, as with the classic quintile-based terms for economic classes). It's fairly common in business settings for managers to buy into one or more of these despite their being bullshit, so the fact that it's used is not much of a qualification.

I'm not saying that there's no such thing as opposing traits, but as far as I know the validated descriptions use continuous dimensions rather than assigning people to corners.

Luc• 9 years ago

I'm not sure what your issue is, but Bartle co-developed MUD before it became a generic term, in the 70s, so his taxonomy of game players is seen through that lens.

AimHere2• 9 years ago

Well it's not just that; at the time, the Bartle MUDs were the only games like it in existence, and so anyone (who happened to have the relevant network access, of course) who wanted to play a multiplayer online game played Bartle's MUD, which is why you got the whole taxonomy playing the same game.

That changed in the late 1980s, when the source code for TinyMUDs and MUSHes and DikuMUDs started becoming publicly available, and the userbase fragmented; the playerkillers went onto their games, the guys who wanted to chat went onto the games optimized for that, the roleplayers to another game, and so on. Nowadays, when there is a clash of playertypes, the misfits tend to get policed off the server - playerkiller types will get kicked out of other servers for griefing, people who optimize their gameplay too hard will get thrown off the roleplaying servers, and so on...

Bartle's insight is actually specific to his time period and his game and the few other MUDs (AberMUD, MIST etc) that were around while running one was hard to do. The insight still holds, but it would have been harder to spot at a later date, when everybody went their separate ways...

ionised3• 9 years ago

What exactly is your criticism?

jlebrech2• 9 years ago

Risk and reward

indescions_2017• 9 years ago

Bartle's four quadrants is standard in gamification practise. Your assessment of its validity probably tracks with how effective you feel gamification can be in altering human behavior ;)

The more interesting modern use case is when people say: "there's this game on my phone I play a lot that helps me with my anxiety." And it's usually something trivial like a free Puzzle Bobble clone that was developed in a week at zero-budget. But for that player, its a lifeline, a coping mechanism.

That's very interesting to me. What is it about this gameplay mechanic that relieves stress? It can't just be escape. To me it seems it has to tap into something more intrinsic than archetypal "hunter-gatherer" era categories.

wildpeaks• 9 years ago

Extra Credits even has an excellent episode on Bartle's taxonomy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxpW2ltDNow

drhayes9• 9 years ago

I've wondered a lot about that too. I bet (and would love to see hard research on) Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing as it applies to games. Like, if the game has rhythmic elements and alpha-state gameplay with EMDR-type eye movements on top... I bet you've got a therapy machine right there.

rubinelli• 9 years ago

I cannot speak for everyone, but in my experience, it is the sense of efficacy and control. You may feel like you don't have any control over your life, but at least you can rule over those colorful bubbles, and be pretty good at it.

nkozyra5• 9 years ago

Except, of course, aside from its pre-set storyline, Grand Theft Auto doesn’t prescribe any of these things.

This is not a fair characterization of the game. Yes, you can avoid doing those morally reprehensible things but not if you actually want to play the game. In much the same way if you feel it's morally wrong to stomp goombas, you can avoid doing so in Super Mario Bros. But unlike the latter, you cannot proceed in GTAV without engaging in some of those undesirable actions.

The notion that we're making these choices independent of the game is disingenuous.

whamlastxmas• 9 years ago

There's a million fun things to do in GTA without hurting anyone, to be fair.

nkozyra5• 9 years ago

Absolutely, I just don't think it's sincere to present it as though GTA itself doesn't offer a ton of context to push oneself in this direction. The premise pivots on the notion that we're doing these things of our own volition.

AmIFirstToThink3• 9 years ago

It gives you a chance to put yourself on the shrink couch in the privacy of your room. You get to know yourself little bit more. You know how flimsy the safeguards are for you to not do the wrong thing. Laws, religious ethics are flimsy to stop you from doing the wrong thing. You realize that at the end of the day, it is up to you as the individual, to do the right thing in a situation. Playing GTA makes you a better, responsible citizen. If GTA makes someone violent, then GTA is acting as a filter to weed out mental health patients early on, before greater damage is done by them.

jerf• 9 years ago

A healthy, well-adjusted individual (which I mean in the psychological sense) notices that GTA and video games in general are very nearly morally null. At best you can create a rather strained line between "desensitization" and the possibility that you will do something bad in the future, which I call strained not so much because it's impossible but just because someone trying to condemn bad behavior in GTA would really like a more solid argument than that, not based in so many assumptions and second-order effects. And if it's that bad you'd like to be able to show a clear line between the rise in play and a rise in violent crime when, if anything, the opposite has occurred. (Which is probably not causal based on this issue. But still, the opposite has occurred, which makes the argument about how bad GTA is even more strained and difficult to make.)

I play GTA and such as videogames, not as morality simulators, because as morality simulators they fail, because there is hardly any moral theory that applies to them. Utilitarianism doesn't tell me to be moral in GTA, because the utiles in my accidentally running down a pedestrian simply because I got impatient at a red light and just drove anyhow is null. Deontological ethics doesn't tell me to take good care of numbers in a computer, unless you adopt a set of rules that says otherwise purely in the name of being contrary for this post alone. (In which case I'd also like you to analyze the ethics of the numbers you changed simply in the act of posting your contrary reply.) Consequentialism doesn't tell me to be concerned about the value of numbers in a computer; I would have higher regard for the health and well being of an individual bacterium than a pedestrian in GTA.

If you tried to read my personality by how I play GTA, you're going to get a very wrong reading, because I am well aware of how null the whole thing is, and I act accordingly. Nor do I find myself learning very much about myself. Nor do I find myself meditating on how flimsy the moral structure is constraining me, because GTA is not "just like the real world except for a few minor differences". It is utterly unlike the real world. It is completely unsuitable for any sort of moral analysis because in a very real way, the entire idea of morality applying to GTA is simply ludicrous, as ludicrous as the idea that I am a psychopath from a family of psychopaths because when we play chess with each other we kill, kill, kill without mercy or concern for how the poor chessmen feel.

d--b2• 9 years ago

Agreed about GTA, but not about Super Mario. At the very least you'll need to kill Bowser to finish the game.

KekDemaga• 9 years ago

He kills himself at the end if I recall correctly, unless you consider moving out of the way of his attacks as killing him.

saint_fiasco2• 9 years ago

Bowser always survives and shows up again in the sequels.

watwut• 9 years ago

Yeah, but doing morally reprehensible thing in GTA is not actually morally reprehensibe. Kinda like writing book about mass murderer is not or rooting for actually unethic hero in movie (alost all of them if you think about it) is not unethical.

nkozyra5• 9 years ago

Not really the point. The premise of the article implies that our actions are free will, as if we were newly born into the GTA world. It's not tabula rasa. Our available actions are constrained by a designed world and our chosen actions built upon context and expectations.

nitwit005• 9 years ago

People are more flexible there than you might think. A friend and I started trying to beat NES Contra without killing anything (it does force you to in parts), and after Googling it later, it seems quite a few people had the same idea. There are "pacifist" speedruns on youtube.

SilasX• 9 years ago

Interestingly I've seen games that require you to cross moral boundaries, even when the game's story shouldn't require it:

1) Knights of the Old Republic: One mission is to steal something form an enemy headquarters. It's possible to sneak all the way to the item and steal it without being detected, but they forced a cutscene when you take it that makes you fight a boss battle.

2) In Morrowind, there are at least some missions where you're just supposed to collect some artifacts but they tag on something where you have to kill a guard even when they're not actually keeping you from getting the item.

jblz2• 9 years ago

The STTNG Episode "The Game"[1] comes to mind :)

In the show, the device physically stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain to the point that players are highly addicted & easily manipulated.

I interpret it as allegory to the way "real" video games leverage variable rewards & other reinforcement to do something similar.

1. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/The_Game_(episode)

AmIFirstToThink3• 9 years ago

I think we as society have lost the ability to give the kids a creative space, that used to be a mile away from homes where they can play in the sand and bushes and water, and just be kids, without adult supervision. Video games let kids experience creation. Video games are satisfying an evolutionary need.

I think nautil.us should write an article on positive effects of mobile phone connectivity. The snobs are looking down on that just like they are on video games.

actionscripted• 9 years ago

This could help explain the massive popularity of sandbox titles like Minecraft.

ourmandave• 9 years ago

...they can play in the sand and bushes and water, and just be kids, without adult supervision.

Recreate Lord of the Flies with GTAV? =)

pm902• 9 years ago

Urban centers through most of human history have lacked a lot of open spaces, and kids have grown up fine. Human brains are incredibly resilient, and you can raise healthy kids even in dense urban areas.

The problem seems to be more about the constant stimuli that comes from internet enabled devices and video games. I grew up without access to much video games or the internet but that made me dream up entire fantasy worlds as a kid, because I was bored. I don't think the current environment allows kids that kind of space to just be bored and create things via imagination.

I'm not a child specialist though so I might be totally wrong about this.

naravara4• 9 years ago

Urban centers through most of human history have lacked a lot of open spaces

For most of human history transportation through urban centers was done primarily on foot and roads were designed to facilitate that. Contemporary urban planning is designed around speedily moving motorized vehicles through and the streets, such as they are, are rivers of traffic that pedestrians have to hurry themselves across during the short windows of time that cars aren't speeding by.

The invention of the automobile has been terrible for letting kids roam around. On the flip-side of the dangers they face in urban centers, the ones growing up in newer suburban areas lack the density to have an appreciable amount of kids of similar ages within walking/biking distance of each other. Many older style, "streetcar" suburbs do, but we haven't build many of those in the past 30 or so years.

ecshafer• 9 years ago

If you read "death and life of great American cities", Jane Jacobs touches on this quite a bit. Urban centers do offer a lot to children growing up. It offers freedom and unstructured play time, which is important. kids are able to explore easily in an urban environment, if it is walkable, and safe. Safety comes from mixed use urban planning that adds many eyes and feet on the street that keep areas safe and welcoming. This also benefits children since even if they come across a Bully, there are multiple escape paths, and a plethora of adults to around to step in. Large open spaces lead to fewer adults around during unstructured play. Children need both unstructured and structured time.

katastic• 9 years ago

In otherwords: Minecraft.

burkaman• 9 years ago

For these researchers, incredibly, enjoyment is not the primary reason why we play video games. Enjoyment is not the primary motivation—“it is rather,” they wrote, “the result of satisfaction of basic needs.”

Isn't this just the definition of enjoyment? Satisfying basic needs is the only reason anybody does anything.

pm902• 9 years ago

Its a good question, and I hope someone with more knowledge also responds to this, but I don't think they are the same thing. There is a difference between things that give you pleasure and things that you enjoy doing. e.g. you might not enjoy doing drugs if you're an addict but its almost always pleasurable.

So I think enjoying something is more long term, higher level aspect than pleasure, which seems more short term. Which explains a lot why people engage in activities which they may not really enjoy, but get the short term pleasure hit. e.g. binge eating, binge TV watching etc

pizza• 9 years ago

If I were a quiet and shy neighbor, and you saw me carrying a small wicker basket with a cloth covering the basket's contents with me everywhere I went, year after year after year, wouldn't you desperately want to know what was in the basket?

ie there are drives (eg water when thirsty) but there are other desires too

dugditches• 9 years ago

To quote part of a recent Alan Kay post here:

"We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality."

hypertexthero• 9 years ago

Simon Parkin is a good writer. See also Coming Of Age With Video Games — https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/coming-of-age-wi...

graphitezepp• 9 years ago

I am glad they took the time to mention Super Smash Bros Melee. That game took over my life for a time, and in hindsight it was because it was the medium that made me feel as if I was expressing myself honestly for the first time.

Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs

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