Adaptive behavior in sandbox games : how motivation shapes use of affordances in virtual worlds

Users of video games actively interact with the game environment, impacting the contents of the environment and altering their subsequent behaviors in meaningful ways. Although motivation is essential to guide behavior, not much work has investigated how motivational processes shape in-game behavior. Therefore, this study incorporates understandings of player motivation with a concept of affordances to build a model of adaptive player behavior in games and virtual environments. The primary prediction was that threats and resources in games will shape initial motivated behaviors to explore and use affordances of the virtual world at variable rates. Using a custom-designed game with varying threats and resources available to players, the approach and avoidance behavior players exhibit in response to motivationally relevant in-game encounters was examined in a laboratory experiment. The moderating role of trait-level motivational reactivity in facilitating and inhibiting motivational responses to the game environment was also examined. A series of repeated measures ANOVAs demonstrated that players' adaptively respond to virtual environment affordances to gain benefits and avoid threats, evidenced by facilitated approach behaviors in the absence of threat as well as facilitated avoidance behaviors under threatening circumstances. Furthermore, individual differences in appetitive and defensive trait motivational reactivity moderated these effects in significant fashion. Overall, these findings clarify the role of game mechanics and affordances of the virtual environment as key shapers of user behavior, and demonstrate that gameplay is made up of discrete adaptive behaviors guided by motivated responses to the game environment.