[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Rewards

[Mike Sellers]

Cruise wrote:
> [Note: replying to lots of people in one]
> 
> Thus spake Raph Koster...
> > cruise wrote:
> >> a) Players don't need rewards if the activity is enjoyable.
> >> b) Rewards for activities often reward the wrong behaviour.
> >
> > I agree with these two points, but I would add
> >
> > c) Players will choose to do an unfun thing endlessly if there's a
> > reward for it
> > d) Players will neglect fun things if it causes them to fall behind in a
> > rat race.
> 
> Absolutely.

I just wrote a (long) reply over on Terra Nova talking about extrinsic vs.
intrinsic rewards
(http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2007/04/rat_atat_tat.html#c66092554).
What you're talking about here -- and the vast majority of what gets
implemented as "gameplay" in MMOs -- are extrinsic rewards.  So yes, a rat
will press a bar thousands of times for a pellet it doesn't need, and a
player will press a key thousands of times for their next "pellet"
(experience points, loot, level, etc.).  We're as subject to Pavlovian
conditioning as the next animal.  

But we're not solely extrinsically motivated, and if you can tap into
people's intrinsic motivators then extrinsic ones pale in comparison.  Only
a few games have done this well -- Flow and Boomshine on the casual side,
The Sims, SimCity, some aspects of games like GTA, The Incredible Machine,
in some ways Tetris or Bejeweled.  But in MMOs, gameplay via intrinsic
motivation is vanishingly rare.  

I think this is because intrinsic motivation in a social game setting is
more difficult to do: extrinsic motivators of points, loot, badges, etc.,
are simpler and more direct.  But these are by no means the only kinds of
motivators we have to work with.  Consider that (as I mentioned in my TN
post) what keeps people coming back to MMOGs are the intrinsic rewards:
their sense of social acceptance, skill esteem, and contribution to a
greater whole.  Unfortunately, these are given short shrift in most MMOGs
rather than being integrated *as* gameplay.  My belief is that as we do this
we'll see less need for overbearing amounts of extrinsic motivation, will be
able to see in context why people do un-fun things, and won't be stuck
making games that devolve into rat races.  

Raph said:
> > A lack of rewards is a very good way to make your game inaccessible and
> > unfun to most people.
> 
> To those who only want rewards, yes. How much data do we have on what
> players actually want (instead of what tehy're willing to play)?

A lot actually: there are orders of magnitude more people playing games that
are mostly or all but entirely rewardless in extrinsic, classical
achievement terms -- we typically call these "casual" games, though there
have been a few others.  I know I keep harping on The Sims, but I think game
developers often don't realize just how successful that game -- which is all
but "rewardless" -- continues to be (I think 9 of the top 20 top-selling
games in 2006 were _still_ Sims games).  

So yeah, if you're focused on the hardcore gamer market, they've learned to
accept and expect gameplay that isn't fun in itself but which provides
extrinsic rewards, just as they've learned that shooting crates gives you
power-ups and killing animals yields gold.  But there's a much larger market
out there of people who see what we call "rewards" in games as pointless,
and thus don't play.  

> Thus spake Sean Howard...
>  > I see encouraging a particular play style as discouraging the
>  > opposition play style. Encouraging grouping discourages soloing, and
>  > so on. Rewards should NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER be used as a social
>  > control mechanism. Behaviorism has been proven wrong repeatedly and no
>  > psychologist worth his degree would ever attempt to apply it to human
>  > behavior.

You're confusing two different things.  Behaviorism as a theory (that
internal cognitive states are irrelevant to psychological inquiry) has
fallen out of favor for very good reasons.  But operant conditioning (the
companion to classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is *extremely* useful and
reliable. 

I disagree completely with the idea that rewards should never be used as a
social control mechanism: much of our real-world government is based on
rewarding behavior that is seen as socially useful, and in games we know
well that *people do what we reward them for.*  As above, the question is do
we reward them extrinsically for fundamentally un-fun behaviors ("oooh,
watch me press the 1 key over and over to 'attack' this thing"), or do we
find ways to create situations and player behaviors that are intrinsically
rewarding?  To the degree that we can do the latter, we will also reward
various forms of socialization, as humans are inherently motivated by
positive social interactions.  

> Thus spake John Buehler...
>  > Right now, games seem to focus on one type of "reward": recognizeable
>  > personal achievement.  That is a viable "inherently enjoyable" form of
>  > entertainment for a lot of people.  

Just to be clear here, what most games reward is the *appearance* of
personal achievement within the game world.  This is not at all the same
thing as intrinsic personal achievement, though most of us have been lulled
into conflating the two.  There is some skill in getting to level 60 or
whatever, and thus some inherent reward for doing so.  But the vast bulk of
the rewards for this are extrinsic in the form of points, loot, mounts, etc.
The reward is not the journey in most MMOGs, but the destination.  The grind
is the journey, and very few consider it to be its own reward.  

>  > The population of current games
>  > demonstrates that.  So people ARE involved in an inherently enjoyable
>  > experience right now.  Unfortunately, what designers have done is to
>  > make every variation of gameplay the same thing; they're all focused
>  > on recognizeable personal achievement.

You're right that we're far too focused on the (young western male) ideal of
personal achievement.  But again, there are far more people who turn up
their noses at this narrow definition of fun or reward than who put their
time into it (far more who are playing other games that do not have this
focus, much less those who play no computer games at all).  And that people
are playing these achievement-reward games does *not* mean that the
activities are inherently rewarding or enjoyable.  

There's little that's inherently enjoyable about doing yet another quest to
bring yet another bland NPC ten more rat tails -- you don't care about the
NPC, the rats, the activity, or the consequences of doing this *except*
insofar as it gets you  extrinsic rewards.  This is precisely the situation
in any operant conditioning regime using a variable schedule of
reinforcement -- it's *extremely* powerful as a conditioning method whether
you're a rat pressing a bar or a human pressing a key.  The only difference
here is that some have talked themselves into believing that if they and
others are conditioned this way, the conditioning activity itself must be
enjoyable (another common psychological trait).  

>  > Much of the griping about the treadmill and so on is that players who
>  > are hoping for other "inherently enjoyable" activities are finding the
>  > trappings of what they are hoping for (crafting, questing, exploring),
>  > only to find that the activities themselves are rooted in
>  > "recognizeable personal achievement".  The challenge to the gaming
>  > industry is to figure out what is "inherently enjoyable" about stamp
>  > collecting and work that into the game. Or juggling, or making beer -
>  > or even engaging in medieval combat.
> 
> It is ironic, is it not, that all the achiever/killer ends up getting is
> a social reward - personal recognition.

Not ironic at all: this is the thread of intrinsic reward from which all the
extrinsic ones hang.  If there is no intrinsic reward (security, social,
skill, contribution) then the extrinsic ones are as meaningless as ashes
(ask yourself what your main WoW character's uber set of purple armor
*means* to you if there was never anyone else around to see it).  


Mike Sellers