[MUD-Dev2] [DESIGN] Rewards

[John Buehler]

Mike Sellers writes:

> > 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.

Heh.  No confusion here, except when playing.  Having pushed the button
morethan a few times for my pellets, I can well imagine that the reason
we keepdoing it is a desire for some intrinsic sense of achievement. 
We've gotsomething that feels like it in the extrinsic sense, so that
intrinsic senseshould be along any moment.  Right?  Any moment.  Here it
comes.  Any timenow.  One more button press.

I might venture to claim that the more obsessive players are
desperatelytrying to make the transition from extrinsic to intrinsic. 
The games movethem in that direction, but can never go any farther than
what is aprimarily extrinsic 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 orreward
> 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.

No argument at all.

> >  > 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).

I'm right there with you, so long as you mean "personal recognition is
theintrinsic reward from which all the extrinsic rewards *of current
games*hang."  Certainly personal recognition is not the intrinsic
cornerstone ofbeing human.

JB