Let Me Be Implicit: Using Motive Disposition Theory to Predict and Explain Behaviour in Digital Games

We introduce explicit and implicit motives (i.e., achievement, affiliation, power, autonomy) into player experience research and situate them in existing theories of player motivation, personality, playstyle, and experience. Additionally, we conducted an experiment with 109 players in a social play situation and show that: 1. As expected, there are several correlations of playstyle, personality, and motivation with explicit motives, but few with implicit motives; 2. The implicit affiliation motive predicts in-game social behaviour; and 3. The implicit affiliation motive adds significant variance to explain regression models of in-game social behaviours even when we control for social aspects of personality, the explicit affiliation motive, self-esteem, and social player traits. Our results support that implicit motives explain additional variance because they access needs that are experienced affectively and pre-consciously, and not through cognitive interpretation necessary for explicit expression and communication, as is the case in any approaches that use self-report.