Faster is better: The speed of player character growth affects enjoyment and perceived competence

The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) predicts that people tend to be proactive and engaged in activities that can satisfy three specific intrinsic needs: 1) the need for competence: the innate desire to grow our abilities, 2) the need for autonomy: the innate desire to be the causal agent of our own life, 3) the need for relatedness, or for meaningful interactions with others. The SDT turned out to be a highly successful tool for investigating video games under several perspectives. In more than 15 years of research, it has been constantly found that the most successful, engaging, and fun video games are the ones that satisfy the intrinsic needs of competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Here, we put to the test the SDT predictions by manipulating the amount of reward given to the player within a commercial video game, Torchlight II - in opposition to applied games and gamified application used in previous studies. Game metrics, video recordings, and self-reported feedback have been collected and analyzed from two groups of video game players that participated in a 60-minutes play session: a) the control group played the standard version of the game, while b) the experimental group played a version of the game that provided five times the amount of rewards. Results showed that the speed of player character growth affected the participants' perceived competence and their enjoyment of the game, although the game metrics indicated that the two gameplay sessions were objectively almost identical. Considerations for games researchers and game designers are presented.