Role-Playing Game Studies by Zagal José

Author:Zagal, José
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Behavioral Psychology and Motivation

Psychologists have examined why games appear to be highly motivating. Indeed, looking for motivational effects has been one of the more fruitful empirical approaches to the psychological study of games (Ryan, Rigby, and Przybylski 2006), including digital and analog RPGs in schools (Bowman and Sandiford 2015; Lieberoth 2015).

Early twentieth-century behaviorism eschewed notions of thought and motives, instead seeing “learned associations between external stimuli and observable responses [as] the building blocks of human development” (Sigelman 1999). Behaviorism centers upon the ways in which human activity can become motivated through positive and negative reinforcement. In the context of games, behaviorism has been used to explain how players may become highly motivated – even “addicted” – to play due to the ongoing reinforcement provided by rewards in games such as World of Warcraft (Yee 2002; Karlsen 2011) and gamification in general (Linehan, Kirman, and Roche 2014). However, such behaviorist frameworks do not help explain why role-taking and pretense play are motivating, and the psychiatric community has thus far resisted acknowledging gaming addiction as a real diagnosis, despite public discourse (APA 2013).

In the latter half of the twentieth century, as cognitive psychology gained footing, motivations other than conditioning and rewards became a legitimate area of inquiry. Motivation in this more recent view refers to the human impulse to perform certain actions or maintain specific attitudes. In humanistic psychology, motivation is viewed as a spectrum from extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation refers to actions that are energized by causes outside the activity itself, such as punishments, rewards, or social pressure. In RPGs, these can be in-game resources, experience points, special items (Karlsen 2011), status gains (Bowman 2010), or fear of losing one’s character or key social relationships in-game.

However, gameplay is also intrinsically motivating: done for its own sake, energized by causes within the activity itself (e.g. Malone and Lepper 1987; Ryan, Rigby, and Przybylski 2006). Players experience enjoyment in the act of play itself, regardless of successes or failures (Csíkszentmihályi 1975). Multiple models of intrinsic motivation exist; immersion, curiosity, and surprise (Malone and Lepper 1987) and experiences of competence, autonomy, and relatedness (Ryan, Rigby, and Przybylski 2006) are repeatedly highlighted as sustaining game engagement over time. More recently, researchers have begun to investigate intrinsic motivation from meaningful experiences (Oliver and Raney 2011) as some players intentionally “play to lose” to evoke negative experiences similar to e.g. tragedies in theater and literature (Montola 2010; Montola and Holopainen 2012). Besides theories stemming directly from psychology, RPG players and designers have developed typologies of player personalities, motives, and preferences that have since been taken up by research (→ Chapter 10).

Clinical Psychology

Role-playing is sometimes used as a therapeutic tool. An early version of the term role-playing was coined by Moreno, an Austrian-American psychologist who founded psychodrama and group psychotherapy. Psychodrama involves a therapist helping individuals to explore psychological issues through the enactment of roles (Blatner 2000). Instead of working through issues one-on-one, psychodrama encourages individuals to cast other participants in the re-staging of key past scenes

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