Game is an integral part of human life. The latest psychological research has proved that games aren’t just what small children do with their toys while their parents are busy. Game is an important cultural mechanism that helps pass the experience between generations and orientates worldwide. Playing games teaches humans to behave in their environment and acquire values, beliefs, and conduct patterns. But even after they’ve grown up, people continue playing psychological games by performing roles in their private and social lives.
However, the game has recently received one more essential sense. It has become not a way to adapt to the world around us and act there but rather to escape from it. More and more people are replacing their real needs, achievements, friends, and even lives with virtual ones, and in-game worlds are disappearing. This phenomenon, game dependence, is widely discussed, and psychologists try to explain and overcome it. That article uses some research results and closely examines the psychological aspects of people’s gaming motivation. It considers what basic human needs can be transferred and satisfied in virtual games.
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This article’s particular topic is mobile games. It should be noticed that the situation with mobile gaming is not as acute as with computer gaming. People don’t tend to spend a long time with their smartphones, and that’s good. This article won’t instruct people on how to make a “bomb” to steal gamers from their families. It should rather be a guideline for mobile software developers to help them create an involving and exciting product to “hook” users.
Human needs that can be satisfied in a mobile game:
1. Need for achievement.
One of the most significant temptations of a game is allowing people to become anyone they want. The opportunities for the game plot and its characters are endless, and the likelihood criterion is optional. So, an unremarkable manager comes home, turns his PC on, launches the game – and becomes an incredible god in a fantastic universe. The longer he plays, the more skills, experience, and points he earns; these rewards are precious.
A game allows a player to become something else, a better, more important person, and be more successful than he possibly is in real life. Achievements in a mobile game are more “salient” than in the real world: they can be made more quickly and easily than in reality, and their results are much more visual (unfortunately, no one receives golden coins or stars after having performed something well in his real life).
This attractive process of gathering game achievements can be considered a kind of substitute for real-world self-development. Why is this aspect important for a mobile software developer? By creating a game, he should generously reward the user for his progress. Stars, coins, additional resources, bonus levels, etc., make players feel their success, enjoy it, and return to the game repeatedly to refresh these feelings.
2. Need for respect.
Being respected and appreciated by other people is an important aspect of social life. Playing alone is good. Playing with other people, demonstrating achievements to them, winning different competitions, and being admired and regarded by other players is just perfect. Winning feels especially good. There are two main kinds of competition in mobile games: direct and indirect.
In direct competition, players fight with online enemies or play matches against online opponents face-to-face. In an indirect competition, the game is performed in a single-player mode, but leaderboards show the names of the best players. In that way, a person can always estimate his game success and compare it to the progress of his friends. But apart from competitions, online games have a significant social side by creating virtual communities.
Being part of a clan or detachment evokes a strong feeling of belonging and cooperation. When we do something for the cause, perform our work well, and contribute to the general prosperity, we are respected and appreciated. So, a mobile game should contain as many social features as possible. Leader boards, online multiplayer modes, creating communities, social sharing buttons—everything connecting the player to other people matters.
3. Need for knowledge.
Learning new things is cool. It doesn’t mean a mobile game should immediately become a school branch on users’ smartphones. But gathering new experiences, discovering exciting facts, discovering a foreign world, or exploring an interesting topic is fun. The thirst for knowledge has always pushed humanity forward; it is in human nature. That’s why solving problems, puzzles, and any other kind of intellectual activity can be an important source of gaming motivation.
A mobile game can also satisfy this need, especially in strategy, RPG, or quest. Filling the game world with mysteries, puzzles, interesting facts, and secrets will turn a user into a discoverer who learns things not because he has to but because he wants to.
So far, three important human needs that can be satisfied in a mobile game have been considered. Taking them into account and creating a mobile game will help it “hook” the users and settle down in their smartphones for a long time.
