Who’s up for a rant? I know I sure as hell am!

Except not today…

See, I started this rant. For context, it was a response to a bunch of screaming internet Game Master dumbasses who decided to have the Min-Maxing Fight for the umpteen-billionth frigging time. You know the one I mean. It’s the one where everyone argues about whether min-maxers — or character optimizers or whatever — about whether min-maxers are objectively evil creatures who should be beaten to death with their own sourcebooks because of how they ruin games for everyone and how they aren’t really roleplaying or whether they’re actually the only sensible players and people who don’t do at least a little min-maxing are shit teammates selfishly sabotaging their fellow parties for the sake of their own uncompromised artistic vision of their characters.

Now, cutting through the crap and laying down the actual correct answer is kind of my thing. So I started writing a rant to explain that, as a Game Master, if you have any position on min-maxing as a concept — and the players who do it — you’re an utter moron. You don’t know jack about shit and someone needs to drag you out from behind your screen because you’re the one ruining the game for everyone. You dumbass.

But this one particular section in the rant just kept demanding more and more explanation until it basically ate up most of the word count. As luck would have it, it was on a topic that’s actually at the heart of many of my fights these days. Hell, it’s actually at the heart of the Agency Rant too, but today’s not the day for that rant. Nor is today the day for the Min-Maxing Rant. The Min-Maxing Rant will come soon. The Agency Rant? I don’t know. Maybe never.

Today, I’m going to take that one section of the rant and give it’s own space. Because it’s something I tried to explain a decade ago. Something I apparently failed to explain given that, for the last ten years, people have kept misquoting and misunderstanding and misapplying it at me.

Let’s talk about Gamer Motivation Modeling, or, if you prefer, why your players love and hate the games you run.

Modeling Player Motivations

Everyone plays games for different reasons, right? I don’t think that’s the sort of statement that’s going to blow any minds, is it? Even people who like the same game can enjoy it for totally different reasons, right? Some people loved Elden Ring for the same reason they love all Soulsborne games; they loved the challenge. Some people loved Elden Ring despite not loving the previous Soulsborne games because it provided a massive open world to explore. To them, the challenge was something to put up with. Or something that dealt with itself if you explored enough to get game-breaking summons and weapons and spells and leveled up enough. Some people loved Elden Ring because it was absolutely gorgeous.

Of course, some of us hated Elden Ring because it utterly failed at being a Soulsborne game and because no amount of wonder and beauty and open-world crap is worth a Souslborne experience that sucks at being a Soulsborne experience.

The point is every gamer games for different reasons. Even two people who like the same game might like different aspects of those games. One person’s favorite part is another person’s thing they put up with to get to the good parts.

Naturally, that makes it tricky to design games. How the hell can you ever please more than one person with a game if everyone’s tastes are totally different and unique and all that crap? Obviously, I’m being hyperbolic here, but you get what I’m saying, right?

Well, it turns out that most gamers’ motivations and desires just aren’t that unique. If you get a lot of gamers talking about the games they love — and the aspects of those games that appeal to them most — and also about the games they hate — and the aspects that ruin games for them — you start to see patterns and clumps and broad groups and general categories emerging. While everyone’s tastes are unique, everyone’s building those tastes from the same basic flavors. It’s like taste buds. We’re all sensitive to the same five or six or whatever broad kinds of flavors, but our individual preferences are a complex gestalt of those five or six flavors.

Now, I’m being very general here. None of this is as simple as just asking people to talk about what they like. You get a much better sense, for example, of how people really feel by looking at what games they buy and which games they put the most hours into and which trophies they get than you do by asking them to explain their preferences. That’s because people are uniformly awful at explaining their own opinions. Even you. That’s just a basic fact about people.

The point is, with enough hard work and research, you can eventually group up people’s tastes and preferences into different categories and give those categories descriptive names. You can call people Explorers or Challenge Seekers or whatever and you can use those categories to make guesses about which people will like what games or even to decide how to design a game to appeal to specific groups of people. That’s as long as you understand what you’re actually doing.

For one thing, you have to remember all of this is fuzzy and descriptive. It’s not prescriptive or definitional and there are no clear, bright lines. It’s just preferences and patterns and tendencies and shit.

For another thing, you have to remember that you can’t just assign every gamer one motivation like it’s an astrological birth sign and then expect that to say everything there is to say about that gamer’s taste. It just doesn’t work that way. Actually, astrology doesn’t even work that way, but that’s a story for another time.

Many years ago, I talked about this thing called the MDA Framework. It wasn’t actually a Gamer Motivation Model — which, by the way, is what we call this way of breaking down games and gamers into descriptive preference category things — it wasn’t actually a Gamer Motivation Model, but it did include a rudimentary Gamer Motivation Model as part of it’s overall approach to game design. I thought it would be useful for Game Masters — especially the ones homebrewing their own game content — to understand why players like the games they like and how to make more of them. And even though I said, “Now, whatever you do, don’t try to just cram every player into one of eight gamer type boxes and then add single elements to your games to make each of them happy because that is totally not how any of this works,” almost everyone assumed that that was, in fact, how any of that worked and thus everyone immediately started classifying their players by their single gamer type. Some of you jackholes even made surveys. Effing surveys!

I’ve been ignoring that shit for years because, even though it was totally wrong, it wasn’t game-ruiningly wrong. Hell, it actually did some of you some good, if only in a broken clock kinda way. But now that my Min-Maxing Rant is bringing the concept of gamer motivation front-and-center — though you won’t know it until next week or the week thereafter depending on when I release what — now that my Min-Maxing Rant is bringing the concept of gamer motivation front-and-center, it’s time for me to finally fix the damage I’ve done.

Let’s talk about The Sims.

Players are Sims…

Do you know The Sims? Probably. Even if you’ve never played a The Sims game, I’m sure you’ve heard of it. The franchise has existed since Will Wright invented it in 2000 because he needed money after his house burned down. Or something like that. The details don’t matter. What matters is The Sims was this brilliant game invented by a brilliant game designer and now it’s hooked up to an EA Games automilker and they’re not going to stop releasing crappy expansions for the latest crappy edition until the cash cow is literally sucked inside-out through its own teat-holes.

Look, they’re just these life sims, right? You’ve got these people — your sims — and you try to keep them alive and happy by buying them shit and building them houses and letting them have pixelated sex anywhere and everywhere, including inside the bouncy castle at their kid’s own birthday party. They’re like horny computer-game versions of those Tamagotchi electronic pet things.

I swear I have a point.

Every sim has the same set of basic motivations. In The Sims, they’re called needs and they include things like Hunger, Energy, Hygiene, Social, Fun, and Bladderfulness. At least that’s how it used to work. I stopped playing The Sims years ago.

Unless you take direct control, a sim tries to satisfy whatever needs seem most urgent to them. If they’re hungry, they’ll eat; if their bladder is full, they’ll pee; if they’re bored, they play a video game or defile a children’s birthday party; and so on. The sims aren’t great at satisfying their own needs and sometimes they get distracted or confused, but they can just barely keep themselves alive on their own if you make sure they have food, a toilet, and a bouncy castle.

Every sim also has a mood. That’s just a measure of how they’re doing overall, but it ain’t a straight translation of needs fulfilled, and this is the important part. First, different needs are weighted differently and the weights change dynamically. When a sim’s only a little hungry, they can easily ignore their hunger and go have some fun instead. When they’re starving, though, their hunger is all they care about and their mood tanks.

Second and relatedly, every sim has a personality, and that affects how their needs are weighted and how quickly they degrade and how easily they’re replenished. An extroverted sim’s mood is very sensitive to that sim’s social need. If their social meter is even a little empty, it makes them very unhappy. Moreover, filling that social meter takes more interaction than a shy sim’s social meter. Shy sim’s social meters don’t ruin their mood until they’re extremely low. Their meters also degrade slowly and refill quickly with short, simple interactions. A shy sim can refill an empty social meter with one short phone call whereas an extroverted sim needs six hours of hardcore partying with a dozen friends.

Motivation Models as Sim Meters

You probably already know where this is going. This The Sims thing is how Gamer Motivation Models work. At least, they’re how you should understand them. Every gamer has the same set of meters inside their gamer brains. For example, the MDA framework posits eight meters…

• Sensation
• Fantasy
• Narrative
• Challenge
• Fellowship
• Discovery
• Expression
• Submission

Each gamer’s individual personality determines how much weight each of those meters affects that gamer’s enjoyment of a given gameplay experience and how fast those meters degrade and how easy they are to refill and all that crap.

Take me, for instance. My Challenge meter drains fast and it affects my mood a lot. I want a game to test me and if the game isn’t testing me, I’m not having fun. That said, I’m not super hardcore and I’m getting old and I kind of suck at games. My tolerance for frustration is high, but not super high. My Challenge meter thus fills up pretty quickly and if it overfills, I just get annoyed.

Meanwhile, my Submission meter — my need to check out and let my brain turn to mush while I just kind of go through the motions — drains very slowly and refills very quickly and barely affects my mood at all. I don’t have much patience for grinding or mining or choosing attack over and over in turn-based combat after turn-based combat.

That is how this shit really, actually works. I’m not a Challenge guy. I’m not not a Submission guy. I have weighted meters that go up and down at different rates and affect my mood differently.

Except even that isn’t the whole picture.

Gaming Isn’t a Pure Experience and That’s a Good Thing

In The Sims some activities affect just one of a sim’s meters. Peeing only affects the sim’s Bladderfulness and — outside some very specific fetishes that I’m sure exist in some expansion or mod somewhere — peeing doesn’t do anything else. Eating a sandwich makes your sim less hungry. Sleeping refills a sim’s energy.

But there some some activities — actually there’s a lot — that satisfy multiple needs at once. Eating a meal with friends can satisfy a sim’s hunger and social needs. Playing a game with friends can feed their social and fun needs simultaneously. These activities are efficient ways to meet multiple needs and they can thus impact a sim’s mood more powerfully than single-need activities even if some of those needs aren’t weighted very highly. A lonely, shy sim who isn’t very hungry and a hungry, extroverted sim who isn’t particularly lonely at the moment can impact each other’s moods drastically by sharing a meal. That despite the fact that they have very different needs at the moment and very different personalities.

I’ll let you do the math there but you shouldn’t have to. You already know this is how games work too. Some people love games for the challenge and some don’t care about the challenge as long as they’re part of the group. Those people can have a great time playing games together even if they’re getting different things from the experience as long as they pick the right game. That’s actually what makes games so awesome. Watching a movie or reading a book can draw you into a good narrative, but playing a game can give you the same and also let you challenge yourself and be part of a social group. A crossword puzzle can challenge you, but it won’t also satisfy your desire to explore a fantastic, imaginary world at the same time.

Very few games provide single-motivation experiences. That’s actually almost a definitional aspect of games. Games are the real-world equivalent of activities in The Sims that meet multiple needs and let multiple sims with different needs and personalities share the same table and get something out of it. Roleplaying games are, in fact, the most that of all games.

See, tabletop roleplaying games aren’t distinct from other games media — like video games and board games — because of the specific mix of motivations they satisfy — though there are some motivations they’re really good for, like Expression, Fantasy, Discovery, and Fellowship — tabletop roleplaying games aren’t unique because of the specific mix of motivations they can satisfy, but because they’re so customizable. Because tabletop roleplaying games aren’t really games in themselves — they’re engines — a clever Scenario Designer or Game Master can satisfy just about any mix of motivations with the right campaign or adventure or whatever. Moreover, as the players’ moods and needs change, the Game Master can adjust the game dynamically on the fly to keep them satisfied.

This, by the way, is why I get so pissed off when dumbass Game Masters insist that roleplaying games are — or should be — all about satisfying a very narrow, very tightly defined set of motives. Those fuckwits are sucking the magic from the medium and someone needs to stop them. This is actually the core of the Agency Rant. But that’s a rant for another day.

Anyway…

… But You Are Not a Sim

It must be stated — again because I’ve stated this many times before — it must be stated that you, the Game Master, are not a sim. You’re not a player. The games you run do not satisfy your own gamer motivations. If you insist, for example, that you like to be just as surprised as your players to justify your use of procedural generation or player-written content, you need to be dragged from behind your screen and shot. You idiot.

If you want to satisfy your gamer needs, get on the other side of the screen. Or play video games. Or board games. Or find other activities that work for you. I’m not saying some aspects of Game Mastering won’t satisfy some of your gamer needs, but rather that that whole framework isn’t a valid way for you to think about running games. This is a framework for understanding why players play games. That’s not what you’re doing.

Shut up your comment fingers; it’s not.

Your motivations — as a Game Master — are far more complex and more personal. I don’t want to get all psychological, but, as a Game Master, you’re probably doing what you do to satisfy broader needs in alignment with your core values. Last month, for example, I told you why I do what I do. Why I make and run games. It was deeply personal stuff about how I connect with others and what I find meaningful. None of it was as straightforward as emptying my Bladderfulness meter.

Running games is way bigger than playing them. Fortunately, just like players don’t need to know how or why games make them happy — they only need to know what games make them happy — you — as a Game Master — only have to know that you love Game Mastering. It doesn’t matter why.

I ain’t saying you can’t have preferences about the kinds of games you run. I sure as hell do. Some games are satisfying to run, some aren’t, and I’m not going to run a game I don’t find satisfying to run. What I am saying — and this is going to be important in the follow-up rant — what I am saying is that you don’t have to share your players’ preferences to run a game for them. You don’t even need to understand them. Hell, your players don’t even need to share preferences with each other.

Every player at your table has a complex mix of motivational meters with different weights and different refresh rates and all that crap. No two players are going to match and none of them will match yours when you’re a player. Even if you just can’t get why some people want a game that tests them to the breaking point, that doesn’t mean you can’t share a table with someone who does. Or run a game for them.

Hell, your job is to be able to do just that.

Understanding Player Motivations Better

Players don’t need to know why some games make them happy and others don’t. They just want a game that makes them happy. You — the Game Master — don’t have to know why running games makes you happy as long as it does make you happy. Technically, you don’t even have to understand why your games make your players happy as long as they do, but it does help you make your players happy if you understand something about their motivations.

There are lots of Gamer Motivation Models out there. The specifics of any given model don’t matter much. They’re all pretty similar; they all overlap. I could pick one and explain it and explain why I like it. Hell, someday, I’d like to write my own Gamer Motivation Model specifically for roleplaying games. But I’d also like a winged horse to ride to the castle I’ll never have either so… yeah…

Meanwhile, we’re stuck with the castoffs from other industries and media. The problem with roleplaying gaming is that it’s a small little niche hobby. Seriously, do you have any idea how small this hobby is? The absolutely most generous, biggest, tippity-toppest, probably totally inaccurate estimate of the number of people actively playing tabletop roleplaying games today is roughly equal to the number of people actively playing Royal Match today. You know that mobile game with the totally fake ads on Facebook where the king has to extract the pins in the right order to get the treasure without getting dunked in lava but which actually plays like fucking Yoshi’s Cookie for the Nintendo Entertainment System? That’s how small our hobby is.

That means roleplaying gaming just doesn’t warrant any level of sophisticated study of its underlying psychology and design principles and everyone’s just free to make up their own terms and models and other horseshit because who’s gonna call them on it. Thus, if you do want any sort of real, good design guidance, you’re stuck swiping it from the video game and board game industries. That ain’t a problem though because most of this stuff carries across the different media of gaming. Video games, board games, card games, party games, and even sports are all doing the same shit that roleplaying games are doing. Our games just aren’t that special.

If you want to learn more about Game Motivation Models, the first thing you should do is check out that paper I keep referencing. It’s called MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. It’s like five pages long and it’s a neat read.

If you really want to dig into this stuff in detail, there’s this amazing research and marketing firm called Quantic Foundry. They’ve got two different — similar — Gamer Motivation Models. One’s for video gamers and one’s for board gamers. There’s actually a lot of meat on their site, including surveys that’ll help you understand your own motivational profile. It’ll also recommend you some games you’ll probably like.

I actually find their video game stuff is more useful than their board game stuff. If you take their gamer motivation survey, post a link to your results in the comments. It’s been a few years; maybe I’ll retake it myself and share my results.

Meanwhile, apart from letting me set right what once went wrong on my site by finally clarifying that thing you all misunderstood a decade ago, I’ve now got a firm starting point to talk about why there is literally no valid opinion about min-maxing and that any Game Master who even talks about min-maxing like it’s an issue — whether pro, con, or in-between — should have their gaming license revoked for reckless stupidity.

So, stay tuned for that. Coming soon. See you then.