Over 90,000 board gamers have taken our Board Game Motivation Model to get their personalized profile. We’ll soon be diving into this data in our blog posts. To set the stage for this, we’ve put together some handy reference material.
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Quick Reference Chart
First, we have a graphic that provides a concise overview of the motivations in the model. We identified 11 board gaming motivations that group into 4 clusters. In each cluster, the top row (darker gray) is the primary motivation–the dominant anchor of the cluster. Motivations in the same column are highly correlated, and much less correlated with motivations in the other columns.
Detailed Reference Slides
Second, we have a PDF set of slides that provides more detailed description of each motivation. To give a more concrete sense of what each motivation means, we also list the highest and lowest 10 board game titles for each motivation.
Stay Tuned
We have some really exciting board game findings we’ll be sharing soon, but we wanted to make sure we lay the groundwork for describing the model before diving too deep in the data. Stay tuned!
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Hi, I believe that Social Manipulation is too generic, it needs split into different sub-categories. A lot of party games are focused on the social deduction and they are far from the conflict is very light. See the games like Spyfall, The Resistance, Werewolf… are Social Fun (Accessible, Cooperation -factions-)+all aspects of Social Manipulation. There is some metric in your study that aggregate Social Manipulation & Social Fun?
Hi Daniele – The motivation model is meant to be configural. Neither games nor gamers fall into just one box. This is why board gamers who take the profile tool get a score in each of these motivations, and it’s those scores holistically that create someone’s profile. So indeed, there are gamers/games that score high on Social Manipulation and high on Social Fun, and this is captured by the model. But there are gamers/games that score high on Social Manipulation and low on Social Fun, and the model would capture this too. As well as any 2-way, 3-way, etc. combinations.
The chart is showing the ingredients, not classification boxes. The columns show how they usually group together, but this doesn’t mean they always group together that way for every gamer.
With 11 motivations, there are 55 possible 2-way combinations and 165 possible 3-way combinations, etc.. It’s not efficient or parsimonious to list all of them. But all these possible combinations are possible (and we could define measures/filters for any of them) using the profile tool and dataset that we have.
Hi Nick: First of all, you and your team do awesome work! Question: will you be putting out any updated analysis or content on your board game motivation model? Also, I’m writing a designer diary post on gamer motivations on BoardGameGeek and would like to embed the handy chart image from this post, but don’t want to run afoul of BGG’s image permission guidelines. Would you be okay granting me permission to upload and embed the image in my post? Alternatively, if you wanted to upload the image onto your BGG profile, I can link to it. Thanks!
Hi Raha – No plans to update the model in near term. And fine to include image in your post as long as you cite this page as the source.