Empowerment contributes to exploration behaviour in a creative video game
Open accessAbstract
Studies of human exploration frequently cast people as serendipitously stumbling upon good options. Yet these studies may not capture the richness of exploration strategies that people exhibit in more complex environments. Here we study behaviour in a large dataset of 29,493 players of the richly structured online game 'Little Alchemy 2'. In this game, players start with four elements, which they can combine to create up to 720 complex objects. We find that players are driven not only by external reward signals, such as an attempt to produce successful outcomes, but also by an intrinsic motivation to create objects that empower them to create even more objects. We find that this drive for empowerment is eliminated when playing a game variant that lacks recognizable semantics, indicating that people use their knowledge about the world and its possibilities to guide their exploration. Our results suggest that the drive for empowerment may be a potent source of intrinsic motivation in richly structured domains, particularly those that lack explicit reward signals.
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The rich creative possibilities are deemed as empowerment to exploration.
“The rich creative possibilities are deemed as empowerment to exploration [12].”
From "When He Feels Cold, He Goes to the Seahorse"—Blending Generative AI into Multimaterial Storymaking for Family Expressive Arts Therapy (2024) · cites this paper as [12]
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- Authors
- Brändle, F., Stocks, L. J., Tenenbaum, J. B., Gershman, S. J., & Schulz, E.
- Affiliations
- Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (DE)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Brändle, Franziska
- Venue
- Nature Human Behaviour
- Published
- 2023-07-24
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1481-1489
- ISSN
- 2397-3374 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4385219792
- Cited by
- 34
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 2
- FWCI
- 13.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Human Behaviour (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) (acceptedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Volkswagen Foundation (VW98569)
- Jacob’s Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Games and Media
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Educational Games and Gamification
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Psychological and Educational Research Studies
- Keywords
- exploratory behavior, empowerment, intrinsic motivation, reward signals, semantic knowledge, exploration strategy, player behavior
- MeSH terms
- Achievement, Exploratory Behavior, Humans, Motivation, Reward, Video Games
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