I live in Finland, and especially in winter I sometimes find myself wondering why my ancestors ever chose to settle in this part of the world, where the weather is harsh and the sun can disappear for days.
But then I catch myself wanting to go to new places and do things that I’ve never done before. Things that I probably shouldn’t do, like running over a mountain. I would be better off sitting in the sofa and watching Netflix. And yet there is something deeply human that pushes us to explore.
In this blog post I will go through the science and psychology behind exploring, and why exploration games feel so compelling.
Exploration games are powerful because they tap into some of our deepest psychological needs: curiosity, autonomy, competence, and meaning. They also offer just enough uncertainty to keep the brain engaged and learning.
Core motivations
Modern motivation research (Self‑Determination Theory) shows that people are most engaged when three basic psychological needs are met:
- Autonomy: the feeling that you can make your own choices.
- Competence: the feeling that you are capable and effective.
- Relatedness: the feeling of connection to other people, places, or communities.
Well-designed exploration games are especially good at satisfying these needs. They give players freedom to choose where to go and what to do, which supports autonomy. They reward players for mastering systems, navigating spaces, and improving over time, which builds competence. And they often create a sense of connection — either to a game world, its inhabitants, or a real-world community of players — which supports relatedness. That is why people can spend hours “just exploring” even when there is no obvious external reward.
Curiosity and uncertainty
Humans (and animals) are strongly driven to reduce uncertainty: we like discovering how things work, especially when outcomes are somewhat unpredictable but still understandable.
Neuroscience suggests that unfamiliar environments trigger prediction errors in brain systems involved in learning and memory, including the hippocampus. These signals can generate curiosity and exploratory behavior, pushing us to map the unknown and turn it into something familiar.
In simple terms, we want to understand the world around us so we do not have to keep thinking about it. Our brains can’t spend time thinking about everything around us. Once we know how something works, the brain can stop spending energy on it and switch to autopilot. When you know your neighborhood well, for example, you no longer have to wonder what is around the next corner.
But we also want to challenge ourselves, but not too much. Sebastian Deterding and co studied what is the right amount of challenge and what is the optimal learning curve to make the games challenging and still enjoyable: Mastering uncertainty: A predictive processing account of enjoying uncertain success in video game play. Their main finding was that people want to remove the uncertainty, learn new things and be amazed on how fast they get better at the game. This same logic works both in idle-clicker games and very hard soullike-games, that require loads of practice to even stay alive in the game.
The pull of curiosity
Recent psychological research (Embracing curiosity eliminates the exploration-exploitation dilemma) argues that curiosity itself can be a sufficient driver of exploration, separate from external rewards like loot, achievements, levels or points.
Exploration games leverage this by presenting information gaps (mysterious ruins, fogged maps, unexplained landmarks) that invite the player to resolve “what’s over there?” purely for the satisfaction of knowing.
In tile hunting and other location-based games, this is built into the whole experience. You have to go to new places in the real world and experience them with your whole body. The best location-based games add virtual rewards on top of that, so the player gets both the real-world experience and an in-game payoff. That creates a powerful double motivation.
Autonomy and self-direction
Self‑Determination Theory research on games finds that perceived autonomy, choosing your own goals and routes, is a major predictor of enjoyment and desire to keep playing.
When players can choose their own goals, routes, and style of play, the experience is more likely to fit their personal interests and needs. Open-world and sandbox exploration games are especially effective here because they minimize forced paths and strict time pressure. Players can follow the main quest, wander aimlessly, collect resources, or simply observe the world.
In location-based games, this sense of autonomy is even stronger because the game takes place in the real world. Players can choose where to go, how far to travel, and what kind of explorer they want to be.
Competence, mastery, and flow
Enjoyment in games is tightly linked to a feeling of growing competence: mastering controls, reading the map, deciphering systems, and solving environmental puzzles.
Exploration games often produce “flow” by offering challenges (navigation, survival, secrets) that scale with the player’s skills, letting them repeatedly experience “I’m getting better at reading this world.”
Location-based games like Wandrio can create this learning curve very naturally. To reach new tiles, players often have to travel farther, plan better routes, and use their available time more efficiently. In other words, the game rewards not just movement, but learning. Over time, players become better at planning, optimizing, and pushing their limits.
Prediction, learning, and “doing better than expected”
Predictive‑processing accounts of play suggest that fun often comes from improving at reducing uncertainty faster than we expected: doing better than our own internal forecast.
Exploration games continuously feed this loop: every time a player successfully infers where a hidden path might be, anticipates what a landmark implies, or navigates more efficiently, they get a small jolt of “I read the world right this time.”
On the other hand, when the player ends up in an uncharted territory like deep woods or rough trails, places that are hard to get, he gets a feeling of achievement. The harder the challenge, the more meaningful success can feel.
Spatial cognition and cognitive maps
Our brains naturally build cognitive maps, which are internal representations of spaces and how they connect. Exploring new environments strongly activates these systems.
Exploration games are satisfying partly because they let us build and refine these maps in a controllable way. Learning a game world can feel rewarding in much the same way as learning a real city by walking through it.
Improving spatial cognition in games may also support everyday skills, such as navigation, route planning, and understanding unfamiliar environments.
Rewards, surprises, and dopamine
Novelty, surprise, and intermittent rewards (hidden chests, vistas, lore bits) spike emotional engagement more than perfectly predictable outcomes do. Most popular games like Fortnite have these kinds of surprises built directly into the game mechanics.
Game designers exploit this by tying small extrinsic rewards (items, upgrades) to intrinsically interesting discoveries, reinforcing exploratory behavior without making it feel purely grind‑driven.
Many popular games use this principle directly. In Fortnite, for example, each match begins with uncertainty: players start fresh, search for loot, and find different items each time. That unpredictability helps keep the experience engaging. Over a longer time scale, quests and unlockable cosmetics add another layer of motivation that keep the player hooked on the game for years.
Social meaning and identity
Even in single‑player, players often feel “relatedness” through attachment to the world, its inhabitants, and their own evolving role or identity within it.
Traditional exploration-heavy games on console or PC let players project who they are: wanderer, scholar, conqueror, caretaker, through the paths they choose and the things they pay attention to, strengthening long‑term engagement.
In location-based games, that identity can extend beyond the game itself. Because the activity takes place in the real world, it can shape how players see themselves in everyday life. A game like Wandrio can help someone start to think of themselves not just as a player, but as an explorer, a nature lover, or a more active person.
What makes exploration so compelling, then, is not just that it is fun. It touches something fundamental in human nature. We are creatures that want to understand, discover, test ourselves, and make meaning out of unfamiliar places. Exploration games work so well because they turn that ancient human impulse into a structured experience, one that rewards both the mind and the body.
References
- https://www.emhance.ai/blog/games-and-psychology-what-players-seek-from-their-first-session
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9363017/
- https://www.ewadirect.com/proceedings/chr/article/view/17377
- https://digitalthrivingplaybook.org/big-idea/self-determination-theory-for-multiplayer-games/
- https://www.gamersexperience.com/building-player-motivation-sdt/
- https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2006_RyanRigbyPrzybylski_MandE.pdf
- https://www.game-changr.com/post/understanding-player-motivation-through-self-determination-theory-a-framework-for-better-game-desig
- https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/psychology/cognitiveaxon/documents/Peterson_2021.pdf
- https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-psychology-behind-games
- https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.825840/full
- https://pathak22.github.io/large-scale-curiosity/resources/largeScaleCuriosity2018.pdf
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/psychology-play-how-games-unlock-human-potential-utberg-mba-e9r1c
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8916124/
- https://arxiv.org/html/2102.04399
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/deep-learning/curiosity-driven-exploration-in-reinforcement-learning/
