Your Gameplay Says it All: Modelling Motivation in Tom Clancy's The Division

Is it possible to predict the motivation of players just by observing their gameplay data? Even if so, how should we measure motivation in the first place? To address the above questions, on the one end, we collect a large dataset of gameplay data from players of the popular game Tom Clancy's The Division (Ubisoft, 2016). On the other end we ask them to report their levels of competence, autonomy, relatedness and presence using the in-house designed Ubisoft Perceived Experience Questionnaire. After processing the survey responses in an ordinal fashion we employ preference learning methods, based on support vector machines, to infer the mapping between gameplay and the four motivation factors. Our key findings suggest that gameplay features are strong predictors of player motivation as the obtained models reach accuracies of near certainty, in particular, from 93% up to 97% on unseen players.