Measuring: Intrinsic motivation
Authors: Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan (www.immersyve.com)
Published: 2007
Number of questions: 21
Likert scale: 7-point [ranging from (1) Do Not Agree to (7) Strongly Agree]
Subscales: Five sub-scales measuring constructs related to intrinsic motivation of players: (1) Competence; (2) Autonomy; (3) Relatedness; (4) Presence/Immersion and (5) Intuitive Controls
The questionnaire is based on the research presented in the The motivational pull of video games: A self-determination theory approach paper from 2006 by R. Ryan, S. Rigby, and A. Przybylski, so the following citation is typically used to reference the PENS:
PENS offers model of "fun" and player satisfaction that provides both heuristic value to developer as they seek to design games to achieve specific goals, as well as analytic value in evaluating games both within and across genres.
The questionnaire is owned by Immersye Inc. and is not freely available, but is widely used.
Validation: Despite its popularity, the results of the questionnaire's validation were not published by the original authors, but it has recently been validated together with another widely used but non-validated questionnare GEQ in the following article: Johnson, D., Gardner, M.J. and Perry, R. (2018) Validation of two game experience scales: the player experience of need satisfaction (PENS) and game experience questionnaire (GEQ). International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 118, pp.38-46. In this article, the authors show that the PENS' purported structure is partially supported. The presence, autonomy and relatedness constructs were supported by the analyses. Competence and intuitive controls appeared to be a single construct, rather than two separate constructs as hypothesised in the PENS, subject to the caveats described in the paper. The details of both the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) can be found in this paper.