Quicksay: Ancilliary Thoughts on Extrinsic Motivation (Patreon)

Some theories and topics are more pleasant than others. Although I’m not going to let this stop me from talking about a certain ideas, I can’t help but feel that Context Sensitivity and Extrinsic Motivation are complete opposites in this regard. Ever since I became more focused on the idea of context sensitivity, I started to see it everywhere. The irritations that are caused by bad cases of context sensitivity were always there but getting a better grasp on the exact problem allowed me to admit that they are real issues, not just something I was imagining. Maybe you had a similar experience after watching the video. I don’t think it’s particularly nice to see behind the context sensitivity curtain but my job is to analyze games so it is what it is. Of course I hope that elaborating on such ideas will help improve games in the long run but long-term improvement can involve short-term suffering. Exercise comes to mind as an example.

I’m proud of the Context Sensitivity video but it does dampen my enthusiasm a little to feel like I inflicted a negative status effect on people by releasing it. Extrinsic Motivation was the opposite. Both topics are equally important to me but thankfully Extrinsic Motivation will probably have a more pleasant effect on people - if it has any effect at all.

I have another positive idea I’d like to share and it’s vaguely related to Extrinsic Motivation. Maybe you’ll disagree but I feel as though discussion about games is more fraught than other media. There seems to be more hostility when it comes to talking about games and I think the Extrinsic Motivation video gave me some idea why. It’s partially because games involve motivation in a way that no other media does. Of course you might be motivated to choose one book or film instead of another but your engagement with them is not dependent on a the same type of ongoing motivation. Once you decide to watch a film, you really just need to sit there and stay awake to get the minimum out of it. Ideally, you’ll be more engaged than that but the minimum is low. Books take more effort to engage with but they don’t involve constant challenges/rewards the way games do and they don’t have differing goals or divergent paths. Unless you’re reading a choose-your-own-adventure thing I suppose.

Anyway, opinions about games just lend themselves more easily to judgmental thinking about the person involved because the kinds of extrinsic motivation which work on each player reveal something (or seem to reveal something) about that player’s intrinsic desires. If you like Animal Crossing and I don’t (I don’t) then I might be tempted to make uncharitable assumptions about you as a person based on the way our motivations differ. Of course if you watched the video, you’ll know I believe these desires are more fluid and malleable than they seem so there’s no point getting too heated about them. Understanding all of this has made me less judgmental about the type of games people play.

Admittedly, I sometimes get frustrated at how little the industry seems to cater to my specific desires anymore, especially in the big budget space. That said, I think it’s important to recognize it’s not a strictly zero-sum game of economics. If you love Star Wars and only want to make some story-driven Star Wars game because you’re attached to that universe, you probably aren’t going to make the action game of my dreams. It’s called an industry but the people aren’t interchangeable parts. All those farming games that seem to eat up the Nintendo Direct were never going to be anything else because the people making them probably don’t want to make a different type of game anyway. Granted, some are probably just chasing money and that motivation can be very unhealthy for our collective well-being but they’re not necessarily depriving you of a more appealing game with an equal budget is my point. Believe me when I say I don’t want to make excuses for the industry but, as is often the case, the truth of the matter is a little more complicated than it might first appear. This thought, too, has made me a little more charitable. I hope.

Unrelated but I have another thought which nearly made it into the Extrinsic Motivation video. I’ve never really given much thought to my thumbnails but I’m having fun picking the “right” one for these theory videos. Before I even started writing the script, I knew I wanted to use a monk from Breath of the Wild for reasons which are probably obvious. In my mind, that’s about the most perfect image you could choose for the topic but it would be a little bit better if the Sheika magic happened to be gold coloured. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of gold in the video. The armour in Ghosts ‘n Goblins, the bolts in Ratchet and Clank 3, the metal in The Tomorrow Children, the coins in Astro’s Playroom, even in the hit counter in Sin & Punishment is gold. They don’t feature in the video but the obolites in Returnal are also gold. It’s not just Nintendo relying on this association of value.

This has been a relatively happy-go-lucky post but I can be a very cynical man. At my most cynical I believe that Kojima included a major reference to Super Mario Bros at a pivotal moment of Death Stranding because he felt he had created something just as important and wanted to bait people into making that comparison. They’re both about traversal after all. It doesn’t seem to have worked but I’m going to risk opening pandora’s box and reluctantly indulge him for a moment. It’s easy to look at Death Stranding and see it as nothing more than an exercise in futurology, a warning that one day some cataclysm will reduce our population and we’ll need to adapt. Nevertheless, Death Stranding is a piece of entertainment, made to be consumed by the people of today. Since it had a reasonable level of success, it might be proof that likes are already becoming the new gold. As a die-hard(man) gamer, something about this comparison between likes and coins makes the concept click a little better for me, not that it wasn’t already pretty obvious.

I think Death Stranding itself is more cynical than most people realized. Given the plot of MGS2, it’s hard to imagine that Kojima would support everything the United Cities of America represents. The game doesn’t end with Sam getting a million likes and being happy about that. Even though Kojima uses social media a lot and is more than willing to pose with celebrities for photos, maybe he’s a little unhappy about the like-driven impulse in himself. Anyway, one day likes could be the new gold standard for humanity but the matter isn’t settled yet. Funnily enough, the special edition of Death Stranding came with some exclusive, golden cosmetics and you’ll never guess what colour the crystals are.