Motivation and Flow Experience as Crucial Factors in the Completion of Narrative Games

Narrative video games are examined in this work as experiences whose completion depends heavily on motivation and flow, with the argument that players who reach a story's ending are sustained by narrative engagement, immersion, and the meaning carried by the conclusion. The analysis draws on established frameworks, including Malone and Lepper's motivation model, Yee's six-motivation taxonomy, Self-Determination Theory, and flow elements adapted from Csikszentmihalyi by Sweetser and Wyeth and by Berube, to explain why certain story-driven titles retain players to the end.

The central empirical contribution is an exploratory comparison of main-story completion rates for narrative games on PlayStation Network (PS4) and Steam at the close of 2022, covering roughly 2020 through 2022. The Last of Us Part II leads with 57.8% completion on PSN, followed by Marvel's Spider-Man at 49.8% and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy at 48.4%. Completion rates were generally higher on PlayStation than on Steam, and year-over-year changes varied considerably, with Horizon Zero Dawn rising from 34.1% to 41.9% and Final Fantasy VII Remake falling by about 17.3%. The authors frame these figures against a broader premise that only about 10 to 30 percent of players typically finish a game.

The authors then connect the most-completed titles, The Last of Us Part II and God of War, to motivation and flow theory, interpreting their high completion as evidence that transportation, curiosity, and emotional involvement sustain engagement through long play. The methodology carries notable limitations: rankings rely partly on trophy-based data collection, and Steam did not provide completion figures, so some comparisons are not fully verifiable. The findings are therefore presented as exploratory, with player interviews identified as necessary to validate the proposed motivational explanations.