The Ingredients of Fun - Part 3: Attribution to Circumstance

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

This psychological concept of 'attribution' I concluded the previous post with, lies at the heart of fun in video games. If you attribute failure to yourself, then the failure will be bearable because you are more aware of the demands of the game, and the challenge will be satisfying. Seeing how this fits together? I'll try to explain this with a stream-of-consciousness example: 

You're playing a Grand Theft Auto 5 (you heathen, you) and you make a mortal mistake: while trying to escape a very angry private security company in your suped-up Banshee, you hit a guard rail and fly off a bridge. Oops, your character died. 

Picture from Google Images

You are rather angry with yourself, because you had a good 10 seconds where you were wrestling with yourself, trying to judge if jumping off the bridge would be a good way to escape. Reflecting on the events prior to your untimely end, you first realize that you were having doubts about the whole idea just before smashing through the rail and falling (albeit with style) to your death. You know a few things could have prevented this, like making the jump in a way that would have caused less damage, preventing your cherry-red ride from transforming into a death-yellow explosion. 

You just attributed the cause of failure to the circumstance, since you can see that you made an uncharacteristically careless decision that only could possibly have ended well with perfect execution. After thinking about various other options you had at the time, you file this experience under "things I won't do again", and in the next chase, live that much longer for it.
The end result is a satisfying experience overall, because after critically-thinking through the situation, you isolate the mistakes made, and by resolving to avoid them from then on, end up learning something that helps you succeed later on.

In my next post I will give an example of a less-than-ideal situation, in which you find the circumstances surrounding your failure to be unfair, and attribute the outcome to an entity, like a nonsensical rule in the game.  
And with that, thank you for reading, and by all-means, comment if anything didn't make sense to you!

-Kenny White
PSN: Fatalis_Veritas