Intrinsic Motivation and the Sense of Community in Multiplayer Games: An Extended Framework for Educational Game Design

Over the years, digital games have become complex, often social environments, sometimes involving large distributed communities. This new generation of games, such as the MMOGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Games), have become very popular and their users spend thousands of hours analyzing in a fast pace new situations, interacting with multiple characters, and solving problems quickly and independently. It is claimed that MMOGs are popular mainly because they motivate players to create communities and interact with each other. On the contrary, the high dropout rate of e-learning is linked with low rates of self-motivation and self-direction in e-Learning. According to these thoughts, there is a need to find new educational technologies that would ensure the learners´ greater motivation and persistence to e-learning courses. Thus, the current research in the e-learning field is focusing its attention in using online games and virtual worlds as educational tools that would motivate and engage learners. This paper dignifies the need for creating collaborative educational online games and includes the findings of a research which addresses the issue of what motivates people to play the popular commercial MMOGs. The results of this research could conclude to good game design principles for the development of motivating online educational games.