My Motivation
Video games motivate their players with mastery all the time! I am living proof of this. Some of us grew up wanting to master sports in school. Some of us wanted to master computer and technical skills. There were also some of us that grew up addicted to video games and the only thing they were worried about mastering was the Xbox Live achievements for Assassin’s Creed II. In case you’re wondering, yes, I am referring to myself there. I was what some would call a completionist. I couldn’t just play the game and finish the storyline. I had to make sure I went through and found all of the different locations, found all of the collectibles, and completed all of the side quests. These games were intentionally designed with all of this extra content to motivate players to put all of this time into it so they could get the “achievements” as a reward. While completing some of these tasks in these games can be very daunting and repetitive at times, it would help the player get tens or hundreds of hours of gameplay out of a $60 video game which made it so much more worth the price.
Another very neat aspect of the Assassin’s Creed game series was the fact that there was so much history incorporated into it. You would travel back to ancient times and go through locations such as Italy, Egypt, Syria, and Greece. You would encounter historical characters and work alongside them during historical events as the game developers devised a way to tie your fictional game character into the event somehow.
There are many different ways people can be motivated by information, education, and mastery, but I can whole-heartedly say that the thing in my life that motivated me the most in all three of those areas was certainly the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise.