Reward whore

[You Should Watch This Even If You Don’t Care About Game Dev] Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular "Facebook Games" era.

This is the thing in everybody’s mind in the gamedev world these days I guess.

Follow-up with Jesper The Ludologist, here’s an excerpt:

“Schell’s basic argument is that external rewards are an incredibly strong psychologically motivator.

Yes and no. If you think about the car that gives you points for a mundane activity such as driving fuel-efficiently, then certainly external rewards can work as a motivator.

But I think that Schell a.o. overlook that external rewards are also known to be strong demotivators. A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.”

I wanted to say that with activities requiring dedication and commitment, like drawing or making music external rewards are unnecessary and/or unproductive. External penalties work better: James Brown not paying his musicians if they were off the beat, making it the tightest band in the show business, still seen as a reference all over the world. Forcing yourself to only paint with fingers because you don’t have the money or the time to learn how to use brushes, is a motivation to get to something. Limitation in creative process is making you go somewhere, the “activity going well, triggering progress” is the ultimate reward.

But the point is, and it’s sort of sad that yes, rewards work extraordinary well with pretty boring tasks. Olivier in the comment thread is saying it better than I could:

“This sounds like “Punished by rewards” book by Alfie Kohn. It’s a whole educational theory based on the idea that external rewards are bad as a method. I dislike external rewards so I would like to believe that study but it’s just one study… And my empirical observation strongly contradicts it: just look at the millions playing WOW or Farmville … See More or for that matter, most video games. Or witness the unbelievable power of the external motivator called money that will keep people in jobs they hate all their lives just because it pays well. I think every game designer has had an opportunity to test how placing some external motivators in a weak part of his game just pulls players through. It ’s artificial, it can even be ethically wrong but unfortunately it works when done right.”

So true that it’s hard to maintain a focus on where to go from that. But the thing is IMO, if rewards are making people who don’t usually care, care about stuff like recycling or being efficient on their health, I don’t see any problems. I know it’s just not as efficient as when you really believe in it because you know it’s important. I’d rather push people getting really involved than pushing them faking it for the goodies but you know, sometimes it’s hard to see that happen. If the “Reward Revolution” is making things better, I’m all in.

Now it’s going for sure to unleash a counter-culture of people who are going to shit all over the reward thing. Who are going to screw the game, the rules.

Hackers. Always a source of problems! (from the article: “Cheating is more of a serious threat than piracy”)

;-)