Video games have already been a huge industry. Every year, more and more new games come out and more and more people go into the world of the game. In this essay, I will analyze why people love playing video games from two aspects: psychological research and my own experience.
Scott Rigby’s research company “Immersyve”, collected years of data and conducted in-house studies at game development studios in order to explain basic human needs and see what makes games so appealing. As they concluded, competency, autonomy, and relatedness are the three elements that make people love video games. Competency means the ability to achieve something. In the game field, game designers usually provide a sense of power for users. For example, gamers know that they can control and master the situation; or gamers will be pleased by the progression of their gaming skills or accomplishing goals. Also, the game designers will provide challenges with varying degrees of difficulty. Autonomy is easy to understand. When we enter a game world, we can freely control our avatar, escaping from the real world. Gamers can be off the control of reality like physics rules. Relatedness reflects the social property of video games, especially online gaming. Besides social bonding, video games can provide a relatedness to the story, fictional characters, or even the environment of the virtual world for gamers. That is what we call “immersive experience”.
From my own gaming experience, the reasons why I love to play video games are complex. Firstly, when I play video games, I can enter an alternate world and temporarily escape from the reality. This is an entirely new world that is different from the real one. I can experience many things that I cannot do in reality. Besides, In video games, I can go through an immersive experience that I can never gain from other mediums like books or tv shows. That implies the “relatedness” elements I mentioned above. Then, for me, video games are a good way of socializing. I am a big fan of Hearthstone. I always play this game with my friends in my spare time.
Most importantly, a sense of achievement will be provided! A sense of achievement will occur when we complete a game. For different genres, there are different kinds of achievements. For games like Dark Souls, the player will gain pleasure by succeeding after many defeats and the growth of game skills; for games like Zelda, people can have their own way through this game, interacting with the whole world, collecting, or beaten bosses as fast as they can.
In the following weeks, I really want to design a game to show a child’s inner world. It should be a 3d first-perspective game: an art game that allows players to explore a child inner world. The whole game is divided into four episodes, which are children’s childhood, youth, and adulthood respectively. Each episode is a story. Players can interact with the game to experience the child’s memories and stories. I have already written out the storylines in my mind.
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