[MUD-Dev] Evolutionary Design

[Sasha Hart]

[DanC]

> All of this leads to a subject that I glossed over in my previous
> essay: Intrinsic motivation.  The reward systems I described in
> the first essay were all extrinsic motivation systems.  In other
> words, the design builds sticks and carrots into the game that
> push the play towards a particular type of action. Intrinsic
> motivation stems from the player's internal desire to do an
> activity.

Extrinsic motivation is incoherent to me.

Let's say that I like talking to my friends (that it's motivating).

It's usually sufficient to say that I like talking to my friends. To
split hairs, I wouldn't like it if they did nothing but abuse me;
there's something contingent about my motivation to talk to my
friends. That might drive me to revise the above: I actually just
like pleasant interaction, and I "only" like talking to friends
because it is often pleasant interaction.

The hair-splitting could be taken arbitrarily far. If I were in a
foul mood, typically pleasant interaction might be unpleasant to me.
Then I "only" like typically-pleasant interaction because I'm not in
a foul mood.

Extrinsic motivation seems incoherent because being a thing which
motivates an activity is just being a thing that activity is
contingent upon. Talking to my friends typically involves
typically-pleasant interaction when I'm not in a foul mood, so it is
indeed true that talking to my friends is motivating. While I could
try to split hairs by introducing hypothetical situations in which
talking to my friends wouldn't involve pleasant interaction or what
have you, that changes the situation such that it's not really
"talking to my friends" as originally conceived, but something else.
As conceived, talking to my friends is motivating (it's academic
that this conception entails motivation only because I'm not in a
foul mood).

I might also add that extrinsic motivation pretty much only exists
in relation to some intrinsic motivation; otherwise we face an
infinite regress. The only reason we would even bother exploring the
biological causes is out of a hope for some termination point - if
not the point at which there really is more to explain, then the
point at which we are satisfied with the explanation at hand.

The pigeon is considered to peck the key because that will result in
some seed, and because the pigeon just likes eating seed. If we then
have to explain the motivation for eating seed, we start to have
more and more difficulty. While it might indeed be possible to
specify the biological causes involved in the pigeon's eating seed,
it is really sufficient in the general case to talk about eating
seed as if it were just inherently motivating.

So I can't really support the distinction between intrinsic and
extrinsic motivation. Something is motivating or it is not. Among
motivating things, it may be possible to figure out why they are
motivating in some other terms, but that doesn't make the original
thing any less motivating.

> People are more powerfully motivated by internal motivation than
> external motivation.  In fact, recent research shows that
> extrinsic motivation can actually diminish performance and passion
> for an activity.  This is wild stuff if you are a game designer
> who come from the "Kill the player when he makes a mistake" school
> of design.

Something which diminishes performance and passion for an activity
is not motivation or incentive for that activity. If a carrot acts
like a stick, we call it a stick for the purposes of motivation.

It *is* really critical to realize that certain rewards can
interfere with others. Imagine playing a game that gave out
experience rewards proportional to use of the 'chat' command. You
wouldn't get better community; you'd get spam. But it should be
clear that this isn't because experience rewards are ineffective
(extrinsic, weaker, more contingent). It is just that experience is
important enough to the players for them to figure out optimal ways
of getting it which also happen to ruin the chat channels. Which may
drive off some or all of the players anyway, even if they like the
easy xp.

In that example, *your* carrots and sticks are effective in
increasing the activity (e.g., they are motivating), it's just not a
good thing. It's obviously also possible for your carrots and sticks
not to make a difference, or for your carrots and sticks to inhibit
rather than motivate activity.

In these cases, it is clear that they are only carrots and sticks by
your intention, not by their actual effects. They certainly don't
qualify as motivators or reinforcers - these terms are defined by
efficacy in encouraging activity.


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