Digital Games: A Motivational Perspective

Information technologies have improved dramatically in the last decade, enhancing the potential of digital games to create realistic and engaging environments where players use different cognitive approaches to solve problems, such as, thinking outside of the box, collaborating in groups and searching for information. Unfortunately not all genres of digital games have taken advantage of the new technology and game design knowledge now available. Commercial and educational games have evolved in different ways. For instance, while the commercial game market has experienced continuous growth, the educational game market is almost non-existent. Users’ preference for commercial games indicates that people have different motivations for playing commercial games and for playing educational games. Motivation theories provide a framework to study how users engage with these games, so that designers can apply the best features of both computer applications to create powerful learning tools.