Since I started to play World of Warcraft, one of the main skills I have been practising is fighting: in effect, it is central to the back-story of the game and therefore the various quests that the player takes directly or indirectly lead him/her to fight other creatures in the virtual world of the game.

Recently, my intrinsic motivation in the game has slightly decreased: the fact I have less time to play because of the various assignments probably plays a part into that since motivation in an activity needs to be sustained by practising that activity.

Nevertheless, another factor which may play a part into this is a decreased interest in fighting: as said above, in virtue of the Practice Principle underscored by Gee (2003, p. 68), I spend a lot of my playing time fighting enemies in order to achieve quests. The problem is that I feel bored with fighting and I feel that the game may sometimes make the player over-practice certain skills.

But surprisingly, I still accept, among other quests, some which directly require killing certain enemies in order to bring back specific items: I suppose the reason for this is that I want to progress in the game and I know that killing enemies while achieving quests is the best way to gain more experience points. In other words, extrinsic motivation plays an important role in my trajectory within the game. In particular, I've realised that the experience bar is a very powerful motivator: I often look at it to see how much progress I have made and how close I am to gaining one level (that's my extrinsic objective for any play session). This is a very good implementation of the Achievement Principle (Gee 2003, p. 67).

This reminds me of a paper which, unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the reference of: it suggested that when an activity is really not interesting, extrinsic motivation can be helpful. Even though WoW cannot be said to be uninteresting, the relative boredom that I recently feel and the event which were just described support that idea. I think that in such cases, making any amount of progress obvious to the student or game player can be particularly effective. However, it should not be over-used so as not to undermine intrinsic motivation (Barab et al  2005).

References:

Barab, S., A. Arici and C. Jackson (2005). Eat your vegetables and do your homework: a design-based investigation of enjoyment and meaning in learning. Educational Technology 45 (1): 15-20.

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, Palgrave Macmillan