I forgot this feeling.
[ A. What do I want to use Self-Determination theory for -- how can I apply Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness to get my games to encourage the particular form of creativity that I like? What is this form of creativity?
B. Apply SDT specifically to the player's internal processes -- not how to win, or even to think about and understand things beyond the boundaries of their self. I am interested in the player's Autonomy, as it pertains to their self-image. I am interested in the player's Competence in understanding and choosing themselves, and in their self-development. And, I am interested in the player's Relatedness regarding their self as it exists in the world. (see page 2 (https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?msg=3638))]
Games that create a shared expressive space... it's easy to make a difficult game, I understand the language of challenge and problem and obscurity, but I don't want to use it.
What creates a good creative space? There are many games that try. Hmm. Why do so many rely on shared struggle to get there? I'm happy to communicate to someone else my work.
A good question—how can I accept any creative work? Importantly, how can I create space for players to accept their own creative work as valid.
I'm creating a context frame within which all creative work is valued. A collective non-judgemental space. Appreciation runs rampant.
source (https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/community-health/patient-care/self-determination-theory.aspx)
Autonomy - "feeling of choice and willingly endorsing one's [own] behaviour"
Competence - "experience of mastery and being effective in one's activity" // danc mentioned something about
improvement as part of this, too
Relatedness - "feel connected and belongingness with others"
- feeling of choice
- endorsing one's behaviour
- mastery
- effectiveness
- connectedness
- belongingness
Why 'improvement', where does that belong? Consider that people are capable of deriving meaning from past and future events: what is future 'effectiveness' as seen from the present? If I can see improvement, movement in the direction of effectiveness, then I will feel competence.
Supporting a person's basic psychological needs to promote striving
According to this link what can be done to 'promote . . . people's strivings'?
- attempting to grasp and acknowledge the person's wishes, preferences, and perspectives
- conveying understanding of people's points of view
- providing a rationale for engaging in a behaviour (?)
- providing choice in how to behave
- refraining from trying to control or pressure to act in a certain way
- providing the person with optimal challenges and opportunities (we see 'flow' state here)
- encouraging their sense of intuition (Christopher Alexander)
- structure for mobilizing and organizing behaviour
- structure for providing relevant feedback
- others show interest in person's activities
- others respond to their feelings with empathy
- convey that the person is significant, cared for, loved
I question the 'challenges and opportunities (specific goals that are challenging enough, but not overwhelming)', or at least a lot of the game design field's response to it...
Hmm, flow state. I am so bothered by score.
What 'optimal challenges' would you provide to a painter? This is the kind of game that I am actually interested in designing.
Scoring Systems & Approval; Improvement and Sense of Competence Scaffolding
How do you know you're doing better? Rather than provide a metric which seeks to quantify the qualitative (effectively overriding an intrinsic -- intuitive -- reward with an extrinsic one, even if it is opt-in), provide the player with an intuitive means to perceive and measure their own success. Appeal to the player's intuition. Activate it.
How can we do that?
Looking back at this list, which of these items can help us?
Quote- attempting to grasp and acknowledge the person's wishes, preferences, and perspectives
- conveying understanding of people's points of view
- providing a rationale for engaging in a behaviour (?)
- providing choice in how to behave
- refraining from trying to control or pressure to act in a certain way
- providing the person with optimal challenges and opportunities (we see 'flow' state here)
- encouraging their sense of intuition (Christopher Alexander)
- structure for mobilizing and organizing behaviour
- structure for providing relevant feedback
- others show interest in person's activities
- others respond to their feelings with empathy
- convey that the person is significant, cared for, loved
-structure for providing relevant feedback
-another's supportive perspective on my work; "understanding"
-providing the player with optimal challenges and opportunities --> this becomes providing the player with challenges and opportunities, or situations, which give them an intuitive appreciation of how they've improved
compare the present player's ability with the past player's ability
ask the player to set their own goals, show them when/that they've achieved them
- guess at the player's goals and show them how they've improved in that respect?
this becomes strange when it's baked in; as an example look at how gamers at large have responded to achievements: now there are lists of achievements for every moderately popular game. walkthroughs and such for how to achieve what the game has suggested is worth achieving. even vieweing a list like this takes autonomous competency away from the player.
there are two losses:
1. the player no longer has autonomy over their improvement, because the reward is seen ahead of time. the player is not rewarded for something they chose to do... instead they choose to do something because they seek to be rewarded
2. the player no longer achieves competency of how to 'read' or 'explore' the game and find avenues for improvement; the road is laid out in front of them and they do not 'explore' a space. rather they only improve upon execution of a task
The previous message exposes a bias that I have; I suppose I am more interested in this 'reading' and 'exploration' than I am in execution. I like them both! But if I could only have one, it would absolutely not be execution, and I have perhaps experienced enough situations where execution has outshone exploration. How can I handle this dynamic? Do I even understand it?
On the other hand, perhaps there is no improvement gradient necessary. What if competence can acknowledge that the player is already good enough? But, then good enough in what respect? My idea of self-determination includes self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-confidence, identity.
Consider a dating sim with many different branching outcomes for the player to explore. I don't really engage with this genre much, let alone its fandoms, so forgive my potentially ignorant perspective. Often I have seen players express their favourite routes (characters to date/romance). This is an expression of self-knowledge: the player attains external knowledge (an understanding of all routes) and then passes personal judgement on their own opinion of that external knowledge (that possible-route-space). The external knowledge is a prerequisite for understanding what one route means over another, but the end goal is self-expression.
Do Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness look different through this lens?
Quote- attempting to grasp and acknowledge the person's wishes, preferences, and perspectives
- conveying understanding of people's points of view
- providing a rationale for engaging in a behaviour (?)
- providing choice in how to behave
- refraining from trying to control or pressure to act in a certain way
- providing the person with optimal challenges and opportunities (we see 'flow' state here)
- encouraging their sense of intuition (Christopher Alexander)
- structure for mobilizing and organizing behaviour
- structure for providing relevant feedback
- others show interest in person's activities
- others respond to their feelings with empathy
- convey that the person is significant, cared for, loved
QuoteAutonomy - "feeling of choice and willingly endorsing one's [own] behaviour"
Competence - "experience of mastery and being effective in one's activity" // danc mentioned something about improvement as part of this, too
Relatedness - "feel connected and belongingness with others"
QuoteI understand the language of challenge and problem and obscurity, but I don't want to use it.
Quotehow can I create space for players to accept their own creative work as valid.
Autonomy and Relatedness are obvious; separating the player's experience into multiple branches which they must actively pursue, w/r/t Self-Determination Of One's Own Identity...
- provides choice (in terms of identity), and relevant feedback for that choice
- (perhaps) conveys that the person is significant, cared for, loved (in a dating sim specifically, the character you date provides this)
- can provide the person with optimal challenges and opportunities to self-perceive: as you explore a route, it may show the upsides and downsides of this choice -- temptations, perhaps, to move to a different route
- encouraging their sense of intuitition, refraining from controlling/pressuring: especially if there is no 'good route' or 'bad route', simply choices... the player is asked to choose based on their own feeling
Relatedness: choosing a route places the player within a subcategory of others who also choose this route, one can display a form of identification; but also being among others who share their route that they chose means that everyone is engaged in the displaying of identity, which here is the core activity.
QuoteCompetence is supported by providing the person with optimal challenges and opportunities (specific goals that are challenging enough, but not overwhelming), encouraging their sense of initiation (try it out!), providing structure . . . to mobilize and organize behavior and providing relevant feedback.
This is interesting. Most of the stuff I've cited above is actually from the Competence subsections.
When I consider that the activity in question is some form of internal activity, i.e. an activity which engages the player's own internal forms of judgement, self-identification, etc... rather than something external, i.e. an activity which acts upon the world or another individual or which even has to do with external stuff made internal (i.e. knowledge)... I find a lot of ground that I would like to work with.
optimal challenges and opportunities (specific goals that are challenging enough, but not overwhelming) . . . to the player's identity --> challenge the player's identity, without overwhelming them
encouraging their sense of initiation* intution . . .
* i just noticed this says "initiation" and not intuition. like, what? is this a typo?encourage the player to choose what appeals to them, what seems close to their true self...
how do we do this? i am so interested in how! // remove all logical noise. encourage you to choose what speaks to you on an intuitive level. remove all calculable systems... i cannot give you any easy foothold to determine what is objectively right or wrong
providing structure . . . to mobilize and organize behavior and providing relevant feedback.structure that mobilizes the player to express themselves, their identity
structure that provides relevant feedback; if you say "this is my identity", i can give feedback
on that level: if you have said that this is your identity, here are concepts related to your identity that you might find useful for better understanding what you have chosen, what you have said.
feeling of choice and willingly endorsing one's [own] behaviouryou can choose to be whatever you want to be. additionally, when there is less systemic/logical noise, there is no conflict between 'identifying' with a choice VS making the 'right' choice. this allows a player to endorse their behaviour as strongly as possible. this may also lie at the root of ludonarrative harmony or whatever...
I remember people asking, what is the art form of games?
What can games do that no other medium can do?
A lot of the answers did not feel meaningful to me. I didn't care, in the long run.
Recently I have started to think along a certain other angle, a different usage of the word art... That's not relevant but I want to mention it cryptically for my future self.
But thinking about the interactivity of games, this 'unique' thing that they bring to art, through the lens of self-perceiving and in particular self-determination regarding one's identity, I think I start to see the unmistakable glimmers of something valuable.
I watched Challengers yesterday and Triangle of Sadness a few days before that. Both these films presented characters in many different lights and situations -- as different people, versions of themselves. I was allowed to perceive these characters go through these versions of themselves.
In theory, a game would allow me to experience this in a deeper sense: not perceiving from the outside, but being from the inside.
How valuable is that? I can say that it is formally a difference, at least.
I watched a video right after about the costume design of Challengers and found myself thinking differently about that than I have ever before. Often I feel that a limited medium has a limited ability through which to push expression. For example, look at 'contemporary costume design' (i.e. you dress people in contemporary, 'ordinary' clothes).
But what if we look at any medium as a way in which a person might try to convey anything, might try to express themselves, and think long and hard about what is being conveyed or expressed?
latte art (https://letterclub.games/2022/05/26/miraculous-coincidences/), still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich (https://xkcd.com/915/), costume design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNbZYBbiZfo).
' What did he mean when he texted "lol k"? '
I can deeply question the intention behind something. I can empathize with someone. An artist, a character. I can think about what they might have been thinking when they made the decisions that they made.
But.
In a game, I can -- in addition -- be the person, the artist, the character, myself. I can be the one making the decisions. I can think about what I was thinking about when I made the decisions that I made.
The topics explored by many games... I do not care about them.
Consider... idk. Sokoban. It's such an easy target. So central.
As a player playing sokoban what are the decisions that I'm making? Through the lens of 'identity', who am I when I'm playing Sokoban? I am a problem solver, and not much else. Perhaps I forget how to remain calm, and I become a resigned or frustrated person. Someone who is failing to solve problems. And then I figure it out and I become a person who solves problems again.
That's it. That's the full extent of my identity shifts as a Sokoban-er, pretty much.
This is on par with some of the most dead-basic shallow plots that exist out there. A character wants something, they can't do the thing, they figure out and do the thing, they get what they want. I hate these kinds of stories with no further depth to them. And so, for the exact same reasons, I hate these kinds of games.
At some point I did like these kinds of stories. Likewise, I liked these kinds of games.
One last thought that I'd like to rope into this whole thing.
'Three-dimensional characters.' What are they?
I think that they are characters who display multiple identities, it's as simple as that.
Because stories take place across time, this is often understood -- very reasonably -- as character development.
I am interested then in games that have three-dimensional players. People and players are different entities, in this model. A person is a person, we all know what a person is. But a player is a person entangled with a game, the person-half of the person-game cyborg. All people are complex, but not all players are complex: their existences are constrained by the game they have paired themselves with.
The Sokoban player does not have a dog, even if the player-person does.
OK, I hate this terminology already, but "three-dimensional player" stands.
I'll ask my friend Maddi about what she thinks a three-dimensional character is and then think about how to apply that to a game's treatment of its players.