Board Game Motivations

Adventure calls!

I haven't posted in a while, but it's for a good reason. I have accepted a new teaching position, and over the summer I will be moving from Durham, NC to Atlanta, GA. That will mean new classes, new students, new friends, and a new life. Right now, the future looks bright—especially because the cursory research I have done so far suggests that there are many board gamers in Atlanta! 

My radio silence doesn't mean that I haven't continued to think and read about board games. Yesterday, Quantic Foundry posted an interesting piece that sums up data they have collected about why board gamers are motivated to play. Gamers reported their primary motivations for gaming, and the options included need to win, immersion, accessibility, social fun, discovery, etc. Nick Yee, the author, broke down these motivations by gender and by age, then presented seven overall takeaways from the data. They are pretty interesting. 

What struck me the most is that the biggest differences in motivation are between people with different gender identifications: male, female, or non-binary. Although motivations were varied across the board (hee!), the data indicated that women more strongly prefer the social aspects of gaming. Only 6.3% of men listed "social fun" as their primary motivation for gaming, compared with a whopping 16.1% of women. Survey respondents who self-identified as non-binary had a strong interest in social fun (10.6%), but placed an even higher premium on immersion and the experience of "getting into" a game (14.7%).

Data is informative, but it's never clear to me what it really means. Self-reported motivations can only tell us so much. Men may seem to prioritize winning, but winning is also part of a social experience, even if they choose not to label it as such. Women were more overtly social as a group, but let it be noted that roughly the same percentages of women and men listed "need to win" as their primary motivation. Primary motivations are not sole motivations—there is a lot of complexity there.

One set of data can't do everything, but I would also have been very curious to see the motivations supplied by primarily solo gamers. It's easier to understand concepts like playing to win—and especially social fun—within the context of group play. Are avid solo gamers wired a bit differently? Or are our motivations roughly the same with or without people to play with? 

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