The Other Game Theory (Customer Motivation)

“If you study as much as you play games, you would’ve become a rocket scientist”

 I think this is an iconic statement that every gamer was told by his parents, just change the career path and the position based on the country and culture of the gamers’ family, yet it could be a worldwide iconic statement.

One of the reasons that made me believe in the commonalty and the universality of this statement is the vast amount of both time and effort that the gamer’s community invests in gaming.

According to Forbes magazine

"The 100 Biggest Gaming YouTube Channels Now Bring in 3.5 Billion Views a Month. That’s more than the number of all the people who have access to the internet combined which is 3.1 billion active internet users."

Over 59% of Americans play games this adds up to 150 million people in the U.S.  alone with the average age of 31. So what keeps gamers in general motivated? What makes them invest long hours in gaming?

Well Maslow might have the answer to these questions; Dr. Abraham Maslow is an American psychologist who described human needs in a pyramid hierarchy and the pyramid levels of motivation or needs is as follows:

• At the bottom of the pyramid are the Basic needs or Physiological needs of a human being.
• The second level of the pyramid is Safety Needs: Security, Order, and Stability.
• The third level of need is Love and Belonging.
• The fourth level is the Esteem
• Then on the top of the pyramid is the Need for Self-actualization.

Just as a thought I wanted to apply Maslow’s motivation theory or the pyramid hierarchy of needs into the gaming world and see if games satisfy the human needs as Maslow visualized them.

Level one the “survival”:

In the 80’s games like Mario, Street Fighter, Contra and Pac man came to being. The common factor being these games is that they are a survival task through satisfying a basic need like eating mushrooms or white dotes in the dark. In street fighter and contra the task was to survive against time or to literally maintain health in front of the opponent.

Level two “Security”:

This is an issue of debate on how the gaming industry has satisfied this level in Maslow’s pyramid of motivation and here are 3 of those points of views:

1- That the gamer himself is safe, not matter what kind of explosions, death threats or even actual killing the gamer is safe.

2- That the game allowed the character to level up increasing the characters power or equipment which provided a higher sense of security, for example in a game called “Earth Worm” the more points the character collects the better the weapon becomes and sometimes get a different stronger weapon all together, In another skating game named after the skater “Tony Hawks” the more points the character collects tony gets to own a new better skating board which means he will fall less and he will be safer and more  secure.

3-This theory suggests that the gaming industry replaced security for progress. In games like “Aladdin”, “resident Evil” and “Mutant Ninja turtles”. The character doesn’t get to advance or progress to the next level of the game until they kill all the enemies or clear all the danger from the level that is currently being played. In other words the character does not get to progress or advance until the area is both safe and secure.

Level 3 “belonging”:

 The gaming industry was able to satisfy this need in more than one way, one way is that the simple fact of being a video gamer your invited to join that inner circle of gamers, the feeling of if you enjoy video games you’re not alone there are other people, other group that shares the same passion as you.

Another way in which games enhance the sense of belonging especially in the age of high speed internet and fiber optics connection, the Internet opened up opportunities for play across local area networks and vast distances. The majority of games have some kind of social features - whether that’s multiplayer, co-op, or massive multiplayer online game (MMO).

Now the gamer is connect with his or her team in real time feed, some of the most obvious examples of this are games like Call of Duty, Far Cry & the racing game Need for Speed.

 

Level 4 “Esteem”:

 From stunning visuals to loud music and praising commentator’s one can easily tell that the gaming culture knows how to raise the gamers self esteem, from the arcade era of gaming up to date achievements, trophies, awards and high points are a big part of the game. This is from as simple as having a high score in the arcade game putting the name on the top list to now sharing the score on every social media platform.

 

Finally level 5  on the top of the pyramid self actualization:

This is actually a hard level to write about as the concept itself of self actualization is debatable even Maslow has modified his pyramid in an academic paper. Yet Maslow himself defined this level in his book motivation and personality as the desire to achieve the highest form of what one aspires to become.

For example, one individual may have the strong desire to become an ideal parent. In another, the desire may be expressed athletically. For others, it may be expressed in paintings, pictures, or inventions.

Gaming satisfy this need in a unique way in gaming the gamer not only gets to be whatever he or she aspires to be, the gamer gets to create both his character and his world in games like “SimCity”, “Spore”, and “Civilization”.

I would like to sum up by saying that all the games that were mentioned have other features and could simulate different motives to different people. Yet this article as part of the series just deals with Maslow’s pyramid and what could mirror his stages in the levels of gaming..

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How do social norms come to be? (marketing trends, social campaigns)

I cannot help but mention the wet monkey theory aka (theory of five monkeys).

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all the other monkeys with cold water. After a while another monkey makes the attempt with same result, all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put the cold water away. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked. Most of the monkeys that are beating him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana. Why not?

Because as far as they know that is the way it has always been done around here.

Could this be the reason behind a lot of our dogmas, taboos and cultures
I really don’t have the answer to that but I do know one thing I do test all my actions and beliefs just to make sure that I am not following the monkey's path

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How accurate are brain scans in predicting behavior?

This is a deep question, and it all turns on what you mean by “predict”. Current machine learning technologies coupled with high-resolution MRI are able to successfully classify scans with near-100% accuracy in simple settings. But that’s for fairly contrived scenarios such as classifying the orientation of a line that the subject is viewing, or the direction of a moving stimulus. Other work has shown that it’s possible to decode natural images, movies and even dreams from the pattern of activations in the visual cortex with fairly high accuracy.

None of this should surprise us - the activity in visual cortex is topographically organized, with different regions dedicated to different regions of space, and tightly coupled to the subject’s perception of the world. With the right technology and decoding algorithms it’s possible to pull out this signal. What’s much less understood is the neural “code” in higher brain areas such as the prefrontal cortex, that subserve abstract thought. But even here it’s possible to classify abstract operations such as addition or subtraction from activity patterns, albeit with lower accuracies around 65%.

However the way most of these decoding algorithms work is that they are first “trained” on a dataset where the experimenter knows the ground truth (such as whether the subject was adding or subtracting) and then applied to a test set to predict mental states or behaviour. Without the training set decoding is often impossible - e.g. it’s not currently possible for us to scan your brain and decode your thoughts unless a suitable training set is available for each possible thought. This is unlikely to change as technology advances - while ultimately every behaviour and mental state is a product of patterns of brain activity, the distributed nature of neural coding and the uniqueness of individual brains means that our thoughts will remain safely locked up for some time to come.

Find the answer here: http://bit.ly/1OSGcH3

This answer was provided by : Steve Flemin,

Cognitive neuroscientist, University of Oxford

More about me here:

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What does it mean when someone says empathy is "self-reflexive"?

In his book "turtles all the way down" John Grinder did talk about the definition of self and how does it differ from one individual to another.

one of the interesting ways to define your self is by defining the "self" by others.

for example some people might think they are lingual  smart people who are able to have a sense of humor in every situation.

so most probably those people define themselves as (smart - funny - social). however in truth some of their comments could be viewed as (aggressive - defensive - ego centered   or hurtful ).

so in the previous case for example the way that one define himself is totally different or in opposite  of how his close circle define him.

in the case of empathy and compassion the perception of self and the way the self is perceived  by others should be in alignment if not identical.

I highly recommend reading the below book as a deeper look into compassion and empathy

Amazon.com: How to Be Compassionate: A Handbook for Creating Inner Peace and a Happier World (9781451623918): His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Ph.D. Jeffrey Hopkins Ph.D.: Books

Written by :Fouad Ahmed
E-mail: Fouad_khafaga@hotmail.co.uk
Twitter: @fouad_khafaga