Players' quality of play and overall interest of the game in dyadic competition

VINCENT DRU
Nanterre University

PATRICIA RULENCE-PÂQUES
Université du Littoral, Boulogne

ETIENNE MULLET
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes

These experiments examined the cognitive processes involved in judging the quality of play of a player competing against another player and the overall interest of a competitive game as a function of the players' respective ability and motivation levels. For the quality of play of one player, a very simple information integration rule was found. Quality of play was judged almost exclusively as an additive function of the ability and motivation levels of the player. For the interest of the game, an apparently complex but fundamentally simple integration rule was found. For a game to be very interesting, players had to be both highly able and highly motivated; for a game to be somewhat interesting, each player had to be at least either highly able or highly motivated; and all other configurations corresponded to lower expected levels of interest.