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Everything’s Meta : Exploring the Desire to seek Challenges beyond a Game’s Design
Beck, Julian (2025) Everything’s Meta : Exploring the Desire to seek Challenges beyond a Game’s Design.
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| Abstract: | This work explores the motivations of individuals that engage in challenge runs involving the Dark Souls trilogy and partake in online communities built around them. A challenge run is a popular metagame in which players build on a game’s mechanical framework and create new approaches to playing by challenging themselves to reach goals within the game while voluntarily restricting access to key mechanics like levelling up. To investigate how common motivators for play carry over to metagames, challenge runners’ motivations were studied through the lenses of Self-Determination, Hard Fun and Fiero, Flow and Social Cognitive Theory. This study’s findings are applicable to game development, demonstrating how games can be designed with autonomy and competence in mind to facilitate prolonged engagement and relevance. Ten semi-structured interviews were conducted with casual and elite challenge runners that participate in relevant communities and analyzed through open coding followed by axial coding. Participants appear mainly motivated by a desire to experience triumph in a game that ceased to facilitate Fiero as decreasing effort and frustration preceded in-game success after long-term engagement. Challenge runs allow for strategizing and growth of knowledge and skill, satisfying autonomy and competence needs. Participants report experiencing Flow when challenge and skill are balanced as well as boredom and anxiety when one outweighed the other. From a social perspective, motivation to challenge run was built through observation and imitation of modelled behavior, reinforced by encouragement and assistance received from peers. Lastly, external motivators are relevant to highly skilled players. This study argues that players creatively appropriate games to satisfy their basic needs, facilitate immersion and moments of triumph and participate in communities that foster mutual support and deep engagement with the game. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 02 science and culture in general, 05 communication studies |
| Programme: | Communication Science BSc (56615) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/106994 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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