I’ve noticed that a lot of gaming discourse revolves around extrinsic motivation. Rolling credits, achievements/trophies, ranking up and the like. (Not pointing any fingers, I am guilty of this myself.)
Then I think back to when I was a kid and how I didn’t care about this stuff as much, I just played and made my own fun. And, as has been made evident by people talking about their own childhood gaming experiences or talking about how their kids play games, it’s not a unique experience.
I’m not sure exactly when extrinsic motivation started being more important to me but I want to try and get some of the Intrinsic motivation back.
I don’t think you can really talk about this topic without touching on the session game, and one of those has been a source of revitalising this for me. That game being Mario Kart World.
Initially it was just screwing around in free roam, very little of it is required for completion so after a certain point pretty early on it exists just for the fun of it (they didn’t even originally intended for the player to know when they had done all the missions and got all the collectables).
Then I started doing Vs mode as a way to play the GPs with the traditional 3 lap structure for a bit of extra fun, just noting down how I did in a notebook. And it madee realise how great vs. mode is in this game in particular, what with all the different routes that are available. I feel like I might occasionally just set up Vs mode, set the tracks to random and see where it takes me.
Maybe it’s an age thing. My daughter endless plays Lego Star Wars, Animal Crossing, and TNMT Shredder’s Revenge on her Switch. And while she love Pokemon, she doesn’t see to have to motivation to stick with Let’s go Eevee or ZA, yet. She has no motivation to roll credits and moving on.
I, on the other hand, look at my game library and see a large number of titles that have yet to be touched. Right now, I prefer to play a title to the end and start the next. This past week I picked up my PS2 controller for the first time in years and started playing through Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
That’s how I’ve been doing games I’m actively playing through now (currently playing Metroid Prime alongside some friends). Then I just have a bunch of session games for when I’m not in the right headspace for it.