🌬️ 🤽🏿 🍓 My research: “Why play competitive online games?” 👨🏾‍💻 📓 ✔️

Instead of introducing

I try to devote each of my works to topics of interest to me - IT, computer games and new media. As you understand, most of the specialized magazines are not always interested in my research - give them marketing and sociology, and therefore I have to write review articles “for the sake of my own interest”, simultaneously lamenting this to everyone who falls under the distribution.

Quite unexpectedly, my supervisor wrote to me - she suggested writing a research article, which is just in my area of interest - the magazine collected publications on the topic of games. Wow! As you remember, I just had sketches of what could be studied. And this article was born. Results and reasoning - under the cut.

We decided on the name, and now it proudly flaunted at the very top of my work - “Motivation for gamers to participate in competitive online games.” We faced the specific goal of the study. The matter remained small - to collect empirical data. But how do we find out the community opinion we need in such an understudied field? As one of the avid fans of playing games, I had an image of games in my head that could become our “experimental rabbits”. As a game, one of the most popular online games in the world (and, more importantly, the CIS) was chosen - Dota 2. Slang of players, roles, gameplay and even their thinking style - I could roughly assume that they will answer, and whether it suits us specifically this audience.

The answer to which method to apply also came by itself - we invited the players to write an essay where they would tell in detail about their experiences, motives, feelings and experiences associated with the game, as well as relationships with other players. My friends in the difficult search for people interested in participating were thematic forums, groups on social networks and channels in messengers.

As a result, we typed as many as 37 essays - a body of texts for subsequent content analysis.

About the research methodology and results

To study the audience of computer games, a content-analytical methodology was developed, developed and tested by E.V. Bataeva and Yu.A. Polyakova, aimed at explication of motives presented in visual texts, based on the concept of motives of human behavior by D. McClelland.

In the beginning, it was planned to divide all participants into periods of the game up to five years and from five or more, respectively, but, unexpectedly, 80% of the texts fell into the second category “from five years”. Okay, then we’ll remove this separation, if we all play a lot and for a long time, we are only better. Find out why they remain in the game! And so, after collecting and analyzing all the essays, the moment of truth came.

These are the results we received after processing all the texts:

No.	Motive	Motive indicator	In the initial period (number of references in the texts)	( )
1.			2	0
			5	1
		,	13	7
2.			4	2
2.			2	2
3.			3	5
3.			1	2
4.			15	6
			4	0
		/ ,	4	2
5.		/	1	4
		()	3	4
		,	4	4
6.		creative activity that is accompanied by positive emotions	4	3
6.		disclosure of talents during the game	6	3
7.	Entertainment	getting pleasure, positive emotions from the game	9	14

We put everything on the shelves, for more beautiful and visual results.

No.	Motive	Rank at the initial stage of participation in computer games	Rank currently
1.	Affiliation	1	3
2.	Achievement	2	3
3.	Self-realization	3	5
4.	Entertainment	4	1
5.	Avoiding Failure	5	2
6.	The power is positive	6	6
7.	Negative power	7	4

According to the results of content analysis, in the initial period, when players take their first steps in computer games, the affiliation motive dominates - the desire to communicate, establish and maintain positive relationships with people, as well as the desire to win, surpass existing standards (achievement motive), realize own abilities (motive of self-realization).

A little essay in the tape

Now let's move on to the funniest thing - considering the most visible essays to understand the results of our research. Here is what the authors wrote to us (to be honest, one of them still makes me smile. Try to guess which one):

“At school I got an invite and played with friends. Then I liked the competitive aspect, and I wanted to become better and better. ”

Here is another similar comment:

“He played to assert himself and have a hobby in which you can feel how you are getting better - a great feeling”

And again we meet another essay in our piggy bank:

“I liked the game right away, and I realized that it took a lot of time to learn how to play well. Skill appeared quickly (100 hours), and even the question arose which of us, friends, have higher skill. For me it was the first competitive moment - to play better than my kents ”

Communication, achievement, self-fulfillment was a pleasure, so the game went hand in hand with entertainment (fourth position in the ranking).

Five authors of the essay wrote that the game has become for them a way to get away from difficult life problems in a more pleasant and comfortable area (the motive for avoiding failure):

“Life is a series of problems that we have to face. And the problems that we meet in the game (for example, in Dota 2) are more pleasant than any others ”

Okay, here he is, the most cheerful - to be honest, he had to be cut by 4 times so that he succinctly fit into the article, but his mention here is worth it:

« . . , , , . — , -. . , , — , , 15 , 2 ( , )»

Great for illustrating manifestations of negative power.

A loss of interest in the achievement was noted by a number of authors of our essays, without particularly going into the reasons for this. However, the analysis of the texts suggests that at least one of the reasons is in the field of communications. The fact that initially, along with the achievement, was the main motive for engaging in e-sports - the desire to establish and maintain positive relationships, to be at the level of the best players, to play in a team - in some cases turns out to be a failure. The following are a few citations from an essay that support this observation:

“All the advantages very quickly come to naught due to one decisive factor - the community, where people can cross out all your efforts during the game with their deliberate action, which leads to defeat, especially with their behavior, bad manners, insults, etc.”

This commentary fits well with the transformation from manifestations of power to entertainment and play for pleasure.

“I tried to play as a captain, I wanted to try to realize my leadership skills, and it seemed to work out, but a low understanding of the game by the players did not allow talent to show. I'm playing for fun now. ”

And finally, the final example:

“I had zero communication, then I realized that I was not a team player, and this game is not for me at all. But he continued to play, because there was nothing more to do. Now I don’t play at all, the game began to cause only disgust "

Instead of a scientific conclusion

At the end of this article I want to say that it was really interesting for me to collect these results and interpret them. Perhaps it will be easier for other researchers to write their work, relying on the data I received and create their masterpieces. Maybe some developer, having opened this article, will see what the modern player lacks - and will fight to conquer the top of the game dev with a fight, and then remember me with a kind word. I hope you were also interested in reading this material. All good and enjoyable games!