The Ingredients of Fun - Part 3 Continued: Attribution to Person

This post is part 3 of 3 on the subject of Attribution Theory, covering attribution to Person. See parts 1 and 2 to learn about what happens when game events are attributed to Circumstance and Entity, respectively.

As we learned from the last post, it is never fun to lose because of a glitch or because the game just doesn't allow much room for your skill to affect the outcome. Players often attribute their failure to the game or some part of it. However, that's not the only thing that can go wrong with attribution. Sometimes, players will attribute the outcome to themselves, or to person. To cite our pal Jesper Juul Ph.D once more, some players in the aforementioned 2006 Gamelab study mentioned, complained not that the game was too hard, but others insisted that they just weren't good at the type of game used for the test. 

More challenging games often have the problem of players wrongly attributing their failure to the entity (often saying simply that the game's difficulty is too high) or person (lose interest in the game, thinking that they will not be good enough to have any success).What is important to realize about games that suffer this, is that they are often entirely fair, but also some combination of the following:

• Give less warning before punishing the player.
• Have stiffer punishments for failure than other games.
• Ways to avoid being punished are less apparent.

All of these attributes tend to intimidate the player, and make them wonder if they are good enough to eventually win, and if such a difficult game is worth the effort.

This concludes our science overviews for now, and I will now move on to some case studies, beginning with the problem of attribution of failure to entity and to player in my favorite game, Dark Souls. The upcoming posts will discuss specific games and parts of them, analyzing them in light of  the knowledge outlined in these science posts.
Thank you for reading, and comment at will!

-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas