Life Mechanics: How Our Environment Can Make Or Break Our Motivation

Awareness can teach us about the aspects of life that we find meaningful. However, its limits leave us blind to potential treasures that exist right under our noses.

We often look around our usual surroundings and think nothing of it, our awareness fixates on daily stressors and pipe dreams. We know that thinking about these situations will not improve our lives, but we cannot help ourselves! Our motivation and productivity dwindle before our eyes and we feel that we have no control. However, what if the answer happened to exist right in our immediate surroundings?

Now, this question might make you think, “I already have everything I need to fulfill my goals, how come I am still unproductive?” Although gaining more motivational tools and knowledge can help us in some situations, in other situations it actually hinders us. How can we become aware of what situation we are in, and change our environment to overcome our obstacles? Strangely, the answer lies in video games.

Effective game designers master the art of manipulating goals. These gurus of motivation handcraft their environments to entice players to behave in particular ways. For example, simply changing the size of a room can cause the player to behave in drastically different ways.

Locking the player in a confined space without any instruction or context will cause the player to exploit any available information. The player will click on every pixel, press every button, and try to use scissors on everything hoping to get anything.

This behavior may seem bizarre when you bring your awareness to it but Authors Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths may have some insight as to why we do this. In their book, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, Christian and Griffiths explain that humans use two methods to obtain rewards: Exploiting and Exploring.

In the case of an escape room, players tend to exploit all the tools and information they have at their disposal in order to obtain rewards. This happens because they have a limited environment to interact with. Players do not have many options in these situations, so they work to gather as much freedom as possible. This behavior provides the greatest reward in tight, prison-like spaces.

What happens if game designers reversed the situation? How would we act if we had more freedom than we knew what to do with? The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild answers this question by presenting a seemingly limitless world to the player. The player has so many options, that the tools and information in their immediate environment seem to hold less value (especially since your weapons break every two seconds).

This kind of environment entices the player to explore. In such a large world, greater treasures surely exist outside of your initial environment. Therefore, players pick a direction and move (relatively) linearly toward that goal, leaving any known rewards behind.

In our daily lives, we tend to regularly switch between exploiting and exploring. How often have you pondered whether to go to your favorite restaurant or try a new one? Watch a show you love on Netflix or find a new one? What do you usually choose?

Although many of these decisions do not drastically affect our lives. Our awareness of these situations can determine whether we live our lives the way we want to. We may be exploiting a job that makes us come in every weekend, and, therefore, miss opportunities to go out with our friends. In that case, exploring for a new job may benefit us more than exploiting our current job.

Alternatively, we could spend our lives constantly exploring new books, or finding new motivational tools. Although we would gather tons of new information, we would never capitalize on the rewards in front of us.

Accumulating new knowledge can help us, but sometimes the treasure we need is right there. Perhaps downsizing the clutter in our lives and putting ourselves in limiting situations can create an environment that motivates us to take action and fulfill our goals.

In either case, recognizing our environments can help us understand our habits. Through this understanding, we can alter our environment to create the situations we need to motivate us to victory. By shifting our awareness, we can learn how to change our behavior to fulfill our goals, thus enticing us to live our best lives.

-Yak

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