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The Impact of Rewards and Trait Reward Responsiveness on Player Motivation

Published: 23 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Despite rewards being seemingly ubiquitous in video games, there has been limited research into their impact on the player experience. Informed by extant literature, we built a casual video game to test the impact of reward types, both individually (i.e. rewards of: access, facility, sustenance, glory, praise) and by variety of rewards (i.e. no rewards, individual rewards, all rewards). No evidence was found for differing reward types impacting the player experience differently. However, evidence was found for a greater variety of rewards having a positive impact on interest and enjoyment. Regardless of the impact of variety of rewards, the individual characteristic of reward responsiveness was found to be predict sense of presence and interest and enjoyment. This paper makes contributions to the application of reward types, general understanding of the impact of rewards on the player experience, and discusses the importance of trait reward responsiveness in player experience evaluation.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI PLAY '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play
October 2018
563 pages
ISBN:9781450356244
DOI:10.1145/3242671
  • General Chairs:
  • Florian 'Floyd' Mueller,
  • Daniel Johnson,
  • Ben Schouten,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Phoebe O. Toups Dugas,
  • Peta Wyeth
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 23 October 2018

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Author Tags

  1. motivation
  2. player experience
  3. reward
  4. reward responsiveness
  5. video games

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CHI PLAY '18
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CHI PLAY '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 43 of 123 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 421 of 1,386 submissions, 30%

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  • (2025)Access Versus Exclusivity in the Digital Creative and Cultural LandscapeNavigating the Paradoxes of Digital Transformation in the Creative and Cultural Industries10.1007/978-3-031-77473-7_3(23-52)Online publication date: 22-Jan-2025
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