View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose Research Online This is a repository copy of The Role of Uncertainty in Moment-to-Moment Player Motivation : A Grounded Theory. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/149801/ Version: Accepted Version Proceedings Paper: Kumari, Shringi, Deterding, Christoph Sebastian orcid.org/0000-0003-0033-2104 and Freeman, Jonathan (Accepted: 2019) The Role of Uncertainty in Moment-to-Moment Player Motivation : A Grounded Theory. In: CHI PLAY'19. CHI PLAY 2019, 22-25 Oct 2019 ACM . (In Press) Reuse ["licenses_typename_other" not defined] Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ The Role of Uncertainty in Moment-to-Moment Player Motivation: A Grounded Theory Shringi Kumari Sebastian Deterding Jonathan Freeman University of York University of York Goldsmiths University York, UK York, UK London, UK [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT theories vary. Thomas Malaby [50] for instance draws on Uncertainty is widely acknowledged as an engaging charac- sociological and anthropological thought on contingency to teristic of games. Practice and research have proposed vari- argue that games are engaging because their "contrived con- ous types and factors of game uncertainty, yet there is little tingency" allows us to engage with the basic indeterminacy work explaining when and why different kinds of uncertainty of human existence. Mark Johnson [33] meanwhile deploys motivate, especially with respect to ’micro-level’, moment- Deleuze to tease apart different kinds of unpredictability in to-moment gameplay. We therefore conducted a qualitative games of chance. But authors concur that some perceived lack interview study of players tracing links between uncertainty of certain knowledge about what is the case, what to do, or experiences, specific game features, and player motives. Data what will happen at a future moment is core to the motivational supports that uncertainty is indeed a key element in keeping pull of gameplay. Drawing on many of these sources and his players motivated moment-to-moment. We present a grounded own practical experience, game designer Greg Costikyan [16] theory of seven types of engaging gameplay uncertainty emerg- developed an influential categorization of eleven sources of ing from three sources - game, player, and outcome - and Uncertainty in Games, including e.g. stochastic randomness document links to likely underlying motives, chief among as in a Roulette game, hidden information (like the hidden them curiosity and competence. Comparing our empirically cards of an opponent in Poker), or player unpredictability - grounded taxonomy with existing ones shows partial fits as not knowing how the opponent will act next. Building on well as identifies novel uncertainty types insufficiently cap- this descriptive categorization of uncertainty as a game fea- tured in previous models. ture, Power and colleagues [59] have attempted to measure and differentiate uncertainty as a player experience. Their Author Keywords Player Uncertainty in Games Scale (PUGS) distinguishes five Games; Uncertainty; Player motivation; Moment-to-moment factors: uncertainty in decision-making, uncertainty in taking gameplay; Engagement. action, uncertainty in problem-solving, exploration behaviour to reduce uncertainty, and external uncertainty, capturing ran- CCS Concepts dom(ized) outcomes. •Applied computing → Computer games; •Human- centered computing → User studies; Valuable as the typologies of Costikyan or Power (and the work informing them) are, they leave the basic question unan- INTRODUCTION swered when and why uncertainty is engaging: What psycho- Uncertainty has long been recognized as a key ingredient of en- logical mechanisms explain when and how different kinds of gaging gameplay [16, 33, 9, 59]. In his early typology of play, uncertainty motivate? Costikyan variously alludes to psycho- Roger Caillois [9] famously describes the relation between logical constructs in footnotes, but as a designer, he chiefly alea, chance-based play, and agon, skill-based strife, observ- teases apart structural game features, taking their motivational ing that either would lose its appeal if it lacked the fitting pull as a given. Power et al. similarly are more interested kind and degree of uncertainty, such as an instance of agon in reconstructing uncertainty as a definitional "foundational where the outcome is determined by luck or is certain from the experience" characteristic for play than in understanding how outset. A great number of game designers and scholars have it may motivate play [59]. Starting with Thomas Malone [51], since reiterated the importance of uncertainty for a good player researchers have suggested and empirically tested links be- experience, and diversely tried to identify different kinds or tween uncertainty and curiosity and suspense in games [82, 48, sources thereof [25, 51, 35, 18, 66, 44]. Terminologies and 1, 29], but such work has remained sparse and disconnected. What’s more, current constructs in game uncertainty research Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or are not grounded in naturalistic observation. No matter if classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed Caillois, Johnson, Costikyan, Power, or others: all develop for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. theoretical models drawing on personal experience and prior For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s). scholarship. Factor analysis (as used by Power and colleagues) CHI PLAY ’19, October 22–25, 2019, Barcelona, Spain may reveal whether there is a structure among such theory- © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). derived items that reflects a structure in people’s self-reported ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6688-5/19/10. experience, but not whether these items capture all, or even DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3311350.3347148 all important aspects of the phenomenon in question. One Participants and Material likely blind spot of existing research in this respect is that it Due to the focus of the larger study, we recruited active players chiefly relies on summative, post-hoc memories of a gameplay of casual games on mobile devices. Based on prior literature, session. This brings with it the well-known issues of memory we operationalized our sample focus as "games one can learn biases and post-hoc rationalization - the "memory experience and conclude a satisfying play session in 10 minutes." [12, gap" [53]: remembered experience is not lived experience, 41, 83, 17, 34]. To avoid priming of e.g. negative stereo- and yet it is lived experience that determines whether a player types around the term, we were careful to never use the label continues to play a game at any given moment (or stops), and "casual" with participants. We only spoke of "games which forms the memories that inform their decision to pick it up are easy to learn and access". We recruited and screened again. prospective participants through a questionnaire distributed via social media, in which they indicated their age, gender, In contrast to summative gameplay memories stands what and the games they regularly played. We purposely sampled game designers call moment-to-moment (m2m) gameplay [81, participants from this pool who reported currently playing 72, 71]. M2m gameplay describes experience on the level games that qualified as casual by our definition and offered of second-to-second input-output pairings around the game’s a range of gender, age, and games played (see Table 1). In core loop [69], as opposed to the longer arcs and loops of game total, we collected data from 13 players, 7 women and 6 men, goals and player strategies [67, 78, 79, 56]. This distinction age 18 to 54. All participants spoke English and had prior echoes game scholars like Salen and Zimmerman [65], who familiarity with games. We stopped data collection at 13 par- distinguish between a "micro" and "macro" level of player un- ticipants when we reached theoretical saturation, which aligns certainty, or Klimmt’s [40] distinction of three analytic levels with prior work indicating that saturation occurs around 12 of entertainment experiences in gameplay, with "input-output participants[26]. loop" as the lowest level. Importantly for our context, game designers hold that smooth, engaging m2m gameplay makes or Data Collection and Analysis breaks player engagement and retention [13, 63]. This makes To remain open to constructs and relations not already cap- it relevant to capture and understand gameplay experience and tured in prior theory, we intentionally chose an open, theory- underlying affordances at the m2m level. For the purposes of generating approach. Specifically, we followed constructivist this paper, we will use moment-to-moment (m2m) gameplay Grounded Theory as developed by Charmaz [11]. We looped to refer to game structures and player experiences that takes data collection, transcription, coding/analysis, and memo- place on the time scale of seconds, with moment-to-moment ing/theorizing to initially reconstruct