With Destiny 2’s recent release, I’m reminded of the infamous “Loot Cave” from the original Destiny. For those who managed to avoid the tales of this most bountiful cornucopia, the loot cave was a particular cave in Destiny that spawned enemies indefinitely. These enemies also dropped loot... indefinitely.
As soon as this was discovered by the community, the cave became incredibly popular— people would spend hours standing still and shooting into the cave. It wasn’t exciting, it wasn’t immersive, it wasn’t fun, but it was efficient. And that’s all that mattered.
Loot cave image from Polygon.com.
Despite what every person who argues about video games online would like to think, gamers have a wide variety of tastes when it comes to games. Even those who enjoy the same genre have different reasons for it— different motivations from which they derive their enjoyment.
Quantic Foundry has an excellent survey, the Gamer Motivation Profile, that goes into this in detail, asking questions about your habits in the games you play and using those answers to derive an estimation of the motivations behind your preferences.
How do these motivations relate to Destiny’s loot cave? The loot cave serves as the perfect example of these motivations being, for a portion of players, completely overridden.
Especially in online games, this phenomenon is not a new one. Regardless of one’s strongest motivating factor in a game, many find themselves pulled in by the siren’s call of the great and powerful human motivation: efficiency. Look through the forums of any MMO and you’ll find the woes of people who feel “forced” to do an activity that doesn’t align with their motivations because it’s a more efficient way to progress.
The drive for efficiency is incredibly powerful. As evidenced in Destiny’s loot cave, it’s even powerful enough to drive players away from the aspects of a game that they enjoy in favor of a mindless grind.
On a personal level, the drive for efficiency has led me to sabotage my own enjoyment of many games. My most driving motivation is discovery. Quantic Foundry describes discovery best in their survey:
“Gamers who score high on Discovery are constantly asking “What if?” For them, game worlds are fascinating contraptions to open up and tinker with. In an MMO, they might swim out to the edge of the ocean to see what happens. In MineCraft, they might experiment with whether crafting outcomes differ by the time of day or proximity to zombies.”
That pretty much describes me to a T— I’m not as original as I thought I was! But, as you can probably imagine, the drive for efficiency is often at odds with the meandering curiosity of a discovery-motivated player.
My gamer motivation profile. Primary motivations on the left, secondary on the right
Even when I manage to resist the urge to shoot into the loot cave for hours, this clash between motivations creates an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. I know that what I enjoy most isn’t what’s most efficient for progress, but... look at how much more rewarded I’d be by the game if I did that boring thing instead?
Cognitive dissonance— what essentially amounts to a mind-battle between competing thoughts— is really unpleasant. It’s why “just don’t shoot into the loot cave and do what’s fun for you” doesn’t work. If I’m not giving in to the efficiency motivation, I’m feeling guilty about it.
When I was thinking about why this problem has become so much more prevalent for me than it used to be, I came to a realization: as with all bad things, the internet makes it worse. All games are now surrounded by an active fan community and, often, a fan wiki containing all the information you could ever need about the game.
I’m reminded of the time that I found my first rapier weapon in Dark Souls. I was so excited that rapiers existed (I don’t know why I’m so into rapiers) that I wanted to know if there were more! So, unwisely, I went to the wiki. I promised myself I wouldn’t look at where to get them— only whether or not more existed at all.
Unfortunately, just looking was enough. I saw that there are only five “thrusting sword” weapons in the game. That’s not necessarily a bad thing on its own, but now that I knew, the game world felt... smaller. And as a discoverer, that’s the last thing that you want.
With information just a couple clicks away, it’s really difficult to resist the temptation to look things up or check out the forums/subreddit and see the community’s tips. Because of this, discovery in games has become a more difficult motivation to realize without complications.
The image that broke me, via darksouls.wikidot.com. Still got them all, though.
Online games these days seem to even be designed around expecting people to gather information and read up on strategies. Unless you’re in a cutting edge raid group pushing for a first clear, MMO raid parties expect you to know the strats before you’ve even faced the encounter for the first time. It’s almost impossible to be both casual and want to go in blind to difficult group content.
It leads me to the question: can an un-wiki-able game be created to force discovery without cognitive dissonance?
The rise of roguelikes and procedural generation in general certainly helps— and I’m only just now realizing that this is probably why I’ve gravitated toward those kinds of games so much. But even then, the moment you introduce multiplayer, you introduce the social pressure to keep up with your friends and the community.
So, what can be done? Is this a design problem that’s unique to our age of instant information? Or is discovery now a motivation that simply requires a degree of self-control to enjoy? Either way, it’s interesting to think about how the environment surrounding games impacts the way that they are enjoyed and, consequently, the way they are designed to accommodate for that environment.
