After last Monday’s class Motivational Analysis Exercise in which I observed as a “Mike” or Csikszentmihalyologist, I have been thinking a lot about motivation in general. More specifically, I have been reflecting about what I find motivating in terms of playing a game. As I grew up (at least chronologically) before the age of computers, the internet, and video based games, I started thinking about some of the toys and games I played with as a youth. This led me to locate the National Toy Hall of Fame, which has links for thirty one different toys. I played with most of them, with personal favorites being the Tinkertoy construction set, and Gilbert’s Erector Set. I was definitely in a state of flow as kid playing with these toys, letting my imagination run wild. These toys were just basically pieces that you could fit together anyway you wanted to, along the likes of wooden blocks or LEGO bricks. Like any toy, play occured while one was in flow, and typically quit when when boredom led to an out of flow condition.
The side of the Tinkertoy container encouraged users to submit unusual model constructions to the game manufacturer for evaluation. To wit, my Mom took a picture of something I made out of Tinkertoys and sent it in. A few weeks later, the company sent me a “Junior Tinkertoy Engineer” certificate “in recognition of creative imagination, ingenuity, and skill.”
This was really quite motivating to me back in 1963, and probably helps explain why I still enjoy building things.
2 comments:
I'm so sad, I missed out on the TinkerToy creativity! I got to play with them only occasionally at a friend's house. The family had lost the original box, so we didn't know there was such wonderful possibilities.
Much of my growing up my brothers, myself and my sister tended to make up more games than were provided for us. And the games we did have from the store had this strange morphing that occurred. There wasn't any statement that the game was boring or not liked, but there was a tendency to change the game play from the original to something apparently more interesting to us.
Of course, we might have just been weird. We would play school by the end of the long summer breaks in anticipation of the new year.
What came to mind for me was the Rubic's cube. My brother and I used to spend hours in the car first trying to solve it and then once we knew how to solve it, trying to "beat" each other to solve it the fastest. Once we knew the secret it lost some of the motivation. For a puzzle like that, it is okay to lose interest and go on to something else. But with learning content, you would like to be able to keep the interest ongoing, or do you? Do you structure games to keep people in the flow until they have learned what they need to learn and then they go on or do you try to create something that teaches/reinforces content but also has a factor that makes the game intrinsic in and of itself?
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