Analysis of Motivational Elements of Social Games: A Puzzle Match 3-Games Study Case

Table 1

Main motivational elements of the social games.

Authors	Elements	Subelements	Examples
D. H. Shin and Y. J. Shin 2010; Meurs 2011 [5, 16]	Time	Asynchronous time	Single player
Ines and Abdelkader 2011; Benkler 2006; Urista et al. 2009; Joinson 2008; Lucas and Sherry 2004; Hou 2011; Wei et al. 2010 [3, 17–20, 22, 32]	Social interaction	Social fictitious presence	To help and to hire friends
		Publication of the activities	Wall post, send invitation for friends to play
Ines and Abdelkader 2011; Hamari and Järvinen 2011; Benkler 2006 [3, 15, 17]	Materialistic needs	Rewarding system	Daily bonuses
Ines and Abdelkader 2011; Kollock 1999; Lucas and Sherry 2004; Hamari and Järvinen 2011; Sherry et al. 2006; Hamari and Lehdonvirta 2010 [3, 15, 20, 23, 24, 26]	Power needs	Competition; Social status	Ranking, weekly championships; Level
Ines and Abdelkader 2011; Joinson 2008; Kollock 1999 [3, 19, 24]	Affective needs	Cooperation	To help friends
		Interest sharing	Gifts (to donate and to receive presents), group needs
Ines and Abdelkader 2011; Lucas and Sherry 2004 [3, 20]	Ambition needs	—	Objectives, challenges, achievements
Ines and Abdelkader 2011; Choi and Kim 2004 [3, 27]	Information needs	Cognitive spontaneity (learning)	Feedbacks, tutorials
Schell 2008; Rao 2008; Benkler 2006; Chang and Chin 2011; D. H. Shin and Y. J. Shin 2010; Csikszentmihalyi 1990 [5, 9, 11, 17, 29, 30]		Playfulness
	Game elements	Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations	Arts, sound, gameplay, mechanics, story, fantasy, plot
		Flow
		Security