In our paper we examine how motive dispositions are related to preferences for the appearance of Pokémon.
But first I would like to thank everyone who played a big part in this research project:
my amazing co-authors Karla, Nicola and Regan
as well as the students who planned and ran our two studies.
Motive Disposition Theory is a theory that is concerned with individual motivations.
These are called motives and they drive our behaviour.
They can help us explain why different players make different choices and enjoy different things.
We distinguish implicit and explicit motives in the domains of Achievement, Affiliation,
Power and Autonomy.
Our focus is on the two social motives: affiliation and power.
Our premise is that there are various ways to play socially.
We know that human beings share a basic psychological need to belong and to some extent we are all social –
so we aim to distinguish people by how they wish to socially interact.
The affiliation motive describes those players who are seeking harmonious social interactions
and the power motive describes players who want to impress, lead, help or intimidate others.
Because explicit motives are conscious and the result of self-reflections, they are assumed
to predict only specific types of behaviour.
You could think of them as new year’s resolutions.
When individuals think about their own motivations, they are likely influenced by their goals
and values and they might describe what they wish to do or achieve, which will likely influence
their short-term choices but does not always lead to lasting long-term behaviour.
Motives orient, select and energize behaviour.
“Orienting” means that our perception is drawn to motive-relevant stimuli.
“Selecting” can mean that motive-relevant memories are remembered more vividly and “Energizing”
means that motives can be linked to stronger physiological outcomes in motive-relevant situations.
Due to perceptions, memories and experiences being influenced by motives like that, we
assume that players who are power-motivated should like strong and intimidating Pokémon
because they wish to establish superiority.
On the other hand, affiliation motivated players might prefer Pokémon that look approachable
and friendly because they want to make friends and be liked by others.
Because there are different ways to achieving superiority or a high status, we distinguish
two enactment styles of the power motive in particular, which are prosocial and dominant power:
In other words, whether players want to empower or overpower other players.
We conducted two studies to test our theoretical assumptions.
In both studies we measured explicit motives.
We had two conditions.
Participants were either told to choose a Pokémon for a fight or as their companion.
We then presented a number of triads featuring three Pokémon each to the participants.
Participants always had to choose which Pokémon they would choose out of these three.
All Pokémon were pre-rated as either strong-looking, cute or neither.
This is an example triad from the study.
And here you can see how each Pokémon‘s appearance had been pre-rated.
I will walk you through our most important results.
So, we found that the context mattered, as generally participants chose stronger-looking
Pokémon for a fight and cuter Pokémon as their companions.
However, even when controlling for context, the power-motive significantly predicted a
preference for strong-looking and a disregard for cute Pokémon.
The affiliation motive did not predict either of these results.
In study 2 we replicated all our findings.
Additionally, we added enactment styles, distinguishing dominant and prosocial power
and we find that only dominant power motivation strongly predicted
a preference for powerful Pokémon.
For the discussion, I will focus on our contributions and general goals.
Our three contributions were to first, show that there is more than one type of player
that prefers to play socially and the distinction matters because second, the power motive and
the affiliation motive do not predict the same appearance choices.
Third, we replicate the importance of distinguishing enactment strategies within the explicit power motive,
when aiming to predict player choices.
Our intentions with this paper were to raise awareness for the variety of existing and
well-researched theories of motivation.
We provided one example of how Motive Disposition Theory can be applied to understand differential
player choices better and we want to encourage digital games researchers to work with these
rich theories that have not yet received much attention within our field but can help us
to broaden our understanding of player motivations.
When players choose in-game appearances they can choose according to their own social motivations
to leave a specific impression on other players.
Power motivation makes people susceptible to visual power cues and pairs them with the
anticipation of positive emotions.
Therefore, motives drive our perceptions, behaviour and experiential outcomes and shape
how we interact with the physical and the digital world.
Thank you for listening.