This the first article of the Understanding Motivation in Games series. The current article will focus on Attribution Theory.
Attribution Theory
Attribution Theory (Weiner, 1985) posits that individuals have innate needs to understand and strive for mastery. The process of attribution allows individuals to establish and understand the causal relationships between causes and event outcomes (successes and failures), which influences and guides their subsequent actions to achieve the desired outcomes.
According to Attribution Theory, ability, effort, task difficulty and luck are identified as four essential causes for successes and failures. These attributions are further divided into three causal dimensions, locus of causality, stability and controllability. Locus of causality consists of internal and external causes; stability concerns whether the causes will change over time, whereas controllability concerns whether the causes can be controlled by individuals. An illustration of the four essential causes and their respective causal dimension are shown in Figure 1. However, interpretations of the causal dimensions of causes may vary individually. For example, an individual may perceive lucky as internal and stable rather than external and unstable, whereas task difficulty may perceive as controllable or uncontrollable depending on the tasks.
Figure 1. Four essential causes and their respective causal dimensions.
These three causal dimensions elicit different emotional responses and motivational consequences. First, locus of causality is associated with pride and self-esteem. In particular, there is evidence that suggests pride is related to task difficulty mediated by causal locus. Accomplishing difficult tasks may elicit greater feeling of pride when compared to easier tasks, because individuals often attribute the accomplishment to internal causes such as ability and effort. An appropriate level of difficulty is crucial for eliciting the feeling of pride. High difficulty level may lead to internal task attribution, which results in frustration and sadness. When difficultly level is too low, it may cause external task attribution, which may lead to boredom. Second, stability dimension is associated with hopefulness and hopelessness. In addition, stability dimension influences expectancy of future success, and perceived competence. Third, controllability is associated with anger, gratitude, guilt, pity and shame. These emotional responses have different motivational impact on future behaviors (Figure 2). For instance, if a player attributes completing a difficult game level to ability (internal, stable and uncontrollable), pride, self-esteem and expectancy of future success will be enhanced, and subsequently increases motivation to play. On the other hand, if a player attributes a failure in game to ability (internal, stable and uncontrollable), hopelessness or shame may be elicited, and expectancy of future success and motivation to play may be decreased.
Figure 2. An overview of Attribution Theory of Motivation.
Attribution Theory and Game Motivation Research
Attribution Theory has been applied in a wide range of topics in game motivation research, from examining player experience (Juul, 2009; Lomas et al., 2017), advancing game design principles (Depping, Mandryk, Li, Gutwin, & Vicencio-Moreira, 2016; Juul 2013), to developing game experience measurements (Depping & Mandryk, 2017; Johnson, Gardner, & Perry, 2018).
In a game research study by Klimmt, Blake, Hefner, Vorderer and Roth (2009), the impact of game difficulty (easy, moderate and very difficult) on performance, satisfaction and game enjoyment was investigated in a first person shooter among male university students. Students were invited to play the game in a quiet room for 10 minutes individually. Satisfaction, enjoyment and perceived game difficulty were measured by a self-report questionnaire. Results indicated that satisfaction and enjoyment were the highest in the easy condition when compared to the other difficulty conditions. The findings were in not fully aligned with the hypotheses in Attribution Theory. According to Attribution Theory, easy tasks can not facilitate positive and motivating gaming experience because of the lack of opportunities for players to demonstrate skills or efforts. Klimmt et al. argued the results were due to the short playing time (10 min) in the study. Players found the easy condition the most enjoyable and satisfied because players did not have enough knowledge to explain their performance, while only relied on the performance feedback (number of kills or deaths) from the game as the only metrics to be used in their attribution process. The authors contended an increase in playing time would allow players to gain more knowledge for understanding their performance, which in turn would shift their experience to become more align with the hypotheses in Attribution Theory. The findings provided evidence in supporting the importance of adaptive difficulty in enhancing engagement and motivation in games.
In sum, Attribution Theory allows game researchers and designers to explain and understand players’ emotions and motivation in games by establishing causal relationships between causes and outcomes. This knowledge can inform design decisions for facilitating games to achieve their intended effects and outcomes.
Note: Weiner (2010) published an article which detailed the process and influences on the development of Attribution Theory for those who are interested in understanding how this influential theory was developed.
References
Depping, A. E., & Mandryk, R. L. (2017, May). Why is this happening to me? how player attribution can broaden our understanding of player experience. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1040-1052).
Depping, A. E., Mandryk, R. L., Li, C., Gutwin, C., & Vicencio-Moreira, R. (2016, May). How disclosing skill assistance affects play experience in a multiplayer first-person shooter game. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 3462-3472).
Johnson, D., Gardner, M. J., & Perry, R. (2018). Validation of two game experience scales: the player experience of need satisfaction (PENS) and game experience questionnaire (GEQ). International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 118, 38-46.
Juul, J. (2009). Fear of failing? the many meanings of difficulty in video games. The video game theory reader, 2(01), 2009.
Juul, J. (2013). The art of failure: An essay on the pain of playing video games. MIT press.
Klimmt, C., Blake, C., Hefner, D., Vorderer, P., & Roth, C. (2009, September). Player performance, satisfaction, and video game enjoyment. In International Conference on Entertainment Computing (pp. 1-12). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Lomas, J. D., Koedinger, K., Patel, N., Shodhan, S., Poonwala, N., & Forlizzi, J. L. (2017, May). Is difficulty overrated? The effects of choice, novelty and suspense on intrinsic motivation in educational games. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1028-1039).
Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological review, 92(4), 548.
Weiner, B. (2010). The development of an attribution-based theory of motivation: A history of ideas. Educational psychologist, 45(1), 28-36.
