Game? Play?

One of my favorite game thinkers, Raph Koster, has an interesting post on a recent talk by Sebastian Deterding on what UX designers can learn from game designers. The blog comments were just as interesting as the post:

Tracking, measuring, rating… these are compelling things, and thus they get incorporated into a great many compelling games, making the confusion understandable (not that, ahem, I really need to tell anyone here that). I definitely share the frustration at dressing things up like a game that aren’t, and do see the danger in that potentially co-opting certain areas of intellectual ground. It’s an error with a certain logic to it, though, and knowing that might help in countering it (hopefully).

and...

My To-Do list is a game. I have a list of things. To defeat said list of things, I have to achieve the tasks. By achieving them, I get the reward of a to-do list with nothing on it, and a “Done” list that grows ever larger. This is little different to my WoW quest log, except the loot is worse :)

All which hints at the core question of what motivates us to get out of bed or off the couch in the mornings? Are we filled with the desire to win the loot (literal or virtual), or filled with fear of losing said loot?

I'm very interested in learning more about the motivation to gameplay, versus just outright play, overall. I suspect it breaks down with respect to gender, age, and how much of that non-virtual loot we need...