In a recent open-ended set of questions, I asked players whether their motivations for playing MMOs had changed over time. Initially, I was interested in seeing whether certain motivations tended to lead into others as a player spent more time in a particular game. For example, do achievement-oriented players become more and more competitive as they get tired of PvE elements and turn towards PvP?

As I started going through the player narratives, it became clear that many players do go through changes in why they play over time, but that it was more complicated than simply one motivation turning into another. For example, the following are very typical of the "play trajectories" that respondents described:

These narratives often blurred the boundaries between well-defined motivation categories, yet at the same time, it was clear that a general trajectory among players was being hinted at. Moreover, there were several points in this trajectory that many players described in very similar ways. Thus, it made sense to abandon framing what was happening as motivation changes and to think about the narratives more broadly as player life-cycles or play trajectories.

In the following pages, I'll lay out what the full trajectory looks like, from entry to burnout and possible return. It's important though to realize that many of the linkages of the trajectory are dependent on the game and how easy it is for players to move through different parts of the trajectory. And of course, many players drop out of a game without going through the entire trajectory because there wasn't enough to keep them going.