Motivational Categories

By Glen Wallace

I'm thinking of modifying my motivation theory to having just two very general categorize of types of motivation; Social and Creative. In so doing the altruistic motive would be merged into as a subset of the Social motive.

The practice of engaging in computer games is a very popular activity that usually involves both of the basic categories. Even when a human is playing just against the computer I believe the social motive still comes into play. The human player ends up anthropomorphizing the artificially intelligent computer generated competitors. The human also brings imagination to play by imagining that there are real human spectators either watching the event on television or are in the stands viewing the event. And when the human does well against the computer generated components, in the mind of the human player, the same reward with the sense of having ones social status among both the competitors and spectators exists just as it would in the real world with real human competitors and spectators.