Wean your child off video games: Using external rewards to undermine intrinsic motivation to play interesting video games

Numerous research findings have supported that external rewards can reduce an individual's intrinsic motivation under well-specified conditions in many domains. This study focused on video game play situations and aimed to examine whether external rewards could undermine children's game-play intrinsic motivation and whether initial interest serves as a potential moderator in this conditional process. Using two-phase experiment designs, two samples of children were and were not rewarded for playing a targeted video game (study 1) and their most favorite/least favorite video games (study 2). Intrinsic motivation was measured by self-reported questionnaires, including affective aspects (i.e., game liking) and decisional aspects (i.e., game-play willingness). The results did not show an overall undermining effect of external reward on game play intrinsic motivation, but revealed a decrease in game-play willingness (not game liking) only for the video games with high initial interest. Taken together, this study was the first attempt to apply the undermining effect in video game play situations and suggested that high initial interest would strengthen the occurrence of this undermining effect, which offers valuable insights for developing targeted interventions to reduce children's excessive game-play behaviors from a novel perspective.