Effect of Success versus Other Players on the Perception of Fun
By: Charles Butler
Supervisor: Michael McCoy
Masters of Interactive Technology degree conferred June 2, 2009
Thesis / Project completed: June 2, 2009 

Fun can be a very difficult topic to nail down since everyone seems to have a different idea about what fun is and is not.  Fun is very desirable in nearly all commercial games, but defining it and actually getting it into a game can prove difficult.  Developers have included multiplayer features into their games since the beginning of the industry in an attempt to create fun, but to what extent does this actually affect a player’s perception of a game’s fun?  This paper gives an overview of the relevant research relating to fun and play before attempting to tackle the key issue of the effect of player success as measured by leader-board rankings on the perception of a game’s fun.  

The testing method devised for this study uses a web-based Flash game that features three different and randomly chosen leader-board versions.  One of these leader-board versions is blank except for the player’s entry.  The other two versions contain a full set of names and scores, but one of them places the player’s entry at the top while the other places it at the bottom.  The game presented embedded surveys to the player both before and after the game.  The testing collected complete results from 132 participants recruited from online forums.  The data analysis attempted to discern if the leader-board versions has any effect on the player’s perceptions of the game’s fun.  Additional analyses attempted to find dependent relationships between any of the other data and the players’ fun ratings.

The inspiration for this study was the leader boards of Xbox Live.  With these leader boards, it is possible to see where you, personally, rank in relation to every other person who has played the same game online.  This seems great for the handful of people near the top of the list, but I wondered if it was actually beneficial to vast majority of player base to know that there were many thousands of players better than them at all of their games.  The purpose of this test was to examine whether or not leader board ranking would affect a player’s perception of a game’s fun.

The key finding was that leader board rankings do affect how players rate a game’s fun, though not necessarily in an obvious or consistent manner.  High rankings appeared to polarize the fun ratings and low rankings appearing to centralize them.  Additionally, the results indicated that leader board ranking had a considerable correlation with replay occurrence.  Players with the winning version replayed 50% more often than the blank version, and players with the losing version replayed twice as often.

Future research topics in this vein might include similar testing across many different demographics to examine the similarities or differences in their reactions.  Similar testing with a wider range of success and failure criteria could also be useful, a much larger, apparently all-inclusive leader board for example.  Similar testing while altering different mechanics might set a baseline for the effectiveness of various features.  In addition, further research into the perception and affect of perceived difficulty could be of great use in game design.

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