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| Re: External Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation | |
| Posted By: Decommissioner | Date: 12/17/10 2:36 p.m. |
In Response To: Re: External Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation (RC Master) : But that alone doesn't work for some people. I would say more than "some" (A LOT of people are done with the game after one play-through on easy). And I understand, from a profits-based perspective, that they want these types of people to play the game some more (and hopefully buy the maps, convince their firends to get the game, and whatnot). : I think its OK to use in-game incentives (cR, rank, armour) with the goal of
I don't mind a system that tries to get player to try new things (some achievements do this) and "to be awesome". I like that. But I wouldn't consider those things as part of the PIS. We agree that the Reach PIS isn't so great at this, but I also haven't seen any other games with a PIS that promotes this kind of stuff. Every PIS I've seen dangles some sort of rewards in front of the player. I think the main reason we aren't seeing eye-to-eye is that we have different beliefs in what a "great" (or even "good") PIS would be like. Until somebody does it "perfectly", there is no definitive way for me to say "no PIS will ever really be good", but that is still my belief. : Heh, well, to be honest I don't think I'd actually speedrun if I couldn't
Ok, probably true for most people, as well. But at the same time, even having your times posted doesn't get you anything. It solidifies your sense of accomplishment (rightly so), but having your time posted isn't a reward by itself. Back to the money-for-good-grade study: while the grade itself is an indicator of how well the student performed, the grade isn't considered an external reward. It's just necessary part of measuring performance and if the student is intrinsically motivated to perform well. The grade just provides a way to compare to others and better measure the accomplishment. When money is introduced, that's an external reward partially because it's arbitrarily associated with the grades (money could be replaced with candy and still have the same result but removing the grade from the system would redefine the system). Once the money is removed, a student who used to strive for high grades becomes less motivated to do so (not say they necessarily start failing). The external reward nearly became the only motivating factor. : I didn't even get Recon
Damn, that sucks. I would be fuming. : Thats the thing though: all it did was get me started. I agree that (some of) Reach's challenges are good for getting people started. The actual challenges part of Reach isn't that bad (ignoring some of the down-right retarded challenges, as those aren't really due to a flaw in the system). I'm arguing that the credits tied to challenges (and even more so to everything else) decreases my enjoyment of the game. From the perspective of a person who would no longer even touch the challenge, or even the game, without the credits, I can see why this PIS might be a good thing for them. But the PIS hurts people that I previously refereed to as "true" fans, the people that play because they want to play. : What I'm trying to say is this: there are many experiences a player can have
I think I've pretty much stated this above, but I wanted to make sure to respond to this part of your post, so sorry if I'm repeating myself. For a large group of players that would otherwise not even take the game off of the shelf, yes, this is good thing (from Bungie's view and the player's). And yes, the cR, armor, rank, etc are ultimately meaningless. But part of the problem, at least for me, was that when Reach first came out, I didn't have the armor I wanted, so that became a meaningful reward to me which lead to the fact that cR became meaningful to me. I used to be playing for even more than just my enjoyment of the game. Now that I have what I want, I feel less motivated to play. I still earn cR, which I've been trained to think they mean something, although they mean nothing to me any more. Now instead of playing for fun AND a reward, I playing for 'just' fun. Logically, I know this make no sense. And of course I'm going to continue playing Reach just for fun. And the longer I play without rewards, the easier it will be for me to play for fun. But it just seems to be how the human brain is wired: introduction of external rewards, to a system that was previously only motivated intrinsically, have a negative affect once removed. : Does Reach's PIS achieve this? For the most part no. But in principle a PIS
As I've stated before, I find it hard to think of a way for a PIS do actually do such a thing. I certainly don't think that any current PIS accomplishes this (not to say I've heard of every game and every PIS on the market). : Thats weird. Why not? In BFBC2, you get the numerical 'rank' and I think
In Reach, when wanted armor, that made credits important to me. It's hard to shake that. What if tomorrow there was some sort of crisis that caused all of your money to be worthless? It would be awfully hard to throw out/burn that money if if you logically and consciously knew that it was no good (and if the crisis ended, there would be a new type of money). Sure, this a bit of a stretch, but I think it does well to highlight the "attachment" to credits that I have gained. : Is it somehow in the way its presented? That you have to 'spend' the credits
I think that this is part of it. In BFBC2, as I was ranking up, I would say to myself "at the next rank, I get to unlock ____". It wasn't so much that the rank was important, it was just getting to the next rank. In Reach, were you spend credits and you have to choose which things to buy for how much, the credits themselves become important as goal. : But I wouldn't care about it if there wasn't a page in my stats that had a
True, but that hole is directly related to your intrinsic motivation to complete stuff. If the system was changed to where you have to purchase the medal to fill in the stats page, I doubt you would care as much, or at the very least, it wouldn't seem as fun/rewarding to fill in the holes. : Its subtler, but its still part of the same scheme of incentives as far as
: This is.... weird to say the least. You want to play it for its own sake, and
It is weird, but yes. Of course I do still like playing, but there is an overall sense in my mind now that it's not worth it and I get bored of playing much faster. (Don't say I'm getting bored faster just because I've played a lot, it took years for me to get bored of Halo 3 so quickly each day). I am trying to get past this feeling, which should hopefully happen with time, but it's frustrating for me right now and makes me want to play Reach even less, to an extent. : One of the things I think, seeing as there is no other place to test all the
Well, not having a place to test all the stuff out is definitely a short coming of the game and I understand that players can feel overwhelmed. Personally, I like games that have training levels that teach you how to do/use everything. As far as I can tell, the only reason I haven't gotten into Team Fortress 2 is because there are SO many things to unlock and learn about the game that I get torn to pieces whenever I try to play. If they were to have a playground where I could test stuff (even if they still had an unlock system, I would like to test everything so that I know what I want to work towards unlocking), then I would probably be much more inclined to get into the game. But training systems aside, those types of progress-to-unlock systems are so much rewards in player's minds as they are things that the player sees as already belonging to him that are just being held for the sake of not overwhelming him. At least, that's how I see it BFBC2, where even the default weapons provide enough fire power/balance that I could happily play the game with just those weapons. In fact, sometimes the game glitches or lags or something and I temporarily get set back to rank 1 and I lose all of my unlocks. I don't really get too mad about this since I can still kick some butt. Sure, it's nice to have a wider variety of unlocks to chose from if I want to change my playstyle up, but I know it's only temporary, so whatever. That is one thing that I'm extremely grateful for in Reach: nothing tied to the PIS affects actual gameplay because in Halo, that could be a huge balance issue. : Oh I was joking really. I mean it sucks for directly killing people with it.
Yeah, I guess I missed that. Oops. : Needler Attack. I sure as heck would play that. Not only do I need practice with the needler, but I generally like gametypes with only specialized types of weapons available (with the exception of a few frustrating weapons). I don't really know how increased damage works with the needler (I didn't really play sniper attack before the weapon pick-up restriction), but that seems like that would add an element of fun (for me anyway; I play firefight to cool down and relax from from multiplayer). -- I'm sure I could have fit this into some part of my post, but I don't feel like going back to find out where. In systems that display rank, I would prefer to be able to hide my rank. This is especially true on forums (some forums do allow you to hide stuff like this and I always do). One thing I hate on forums is a "karma" system when people give you points for good posts and remove points for spam and the such. I'm not worried that people won't like my posts, I just know that I will start to post for the reason of gaining karma rather than to be helpful or whatever. (I'm not sure if you are familiar with a site called reddit, but many users there submit stories just for the karma points they will surely gain.) I always hide my karma when possible. By doing this, I remove any possibility of arbitrarily assigned, external rewards and allows me to focus of the content of the forum.
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