Comments on: Demotivation by External Rewards

By: Games Do Not Equal Gamification - Indigitous.orgIndigitous.org

Games Do Not Equal Gamification - Indigitous.orgIndigitous.org — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 21:31:58 +0000

[…] Jesper Juul reminded us, external rewards have actually been shown to decrease motivation to perform more complex […]

By: Games Do Not Equal Gamification | Indigitous.org

Games Do Not Equal Gamification | Indigitous.org — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 14:41:43 +0000

[…] Jesper Juul reminded us, external rewards have actually been shown to decrease motivation to perform more complex […]

By: Jesper

Jesper — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:59:40 +0000

@Fabricio
I agree, there is a large and interesting social component that seems not to be well understood. I am browsing through some psychology readings on the subject, and the article below seems to be relevant, for example. Will post if I come up with something interesting.

Buunk, A. P., Cohen-Schotanus, J., & van Nek, R. H. (2007). Why and how people engage in social comparison while learning social skills in groups. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 11(3), 140-152.

By: Fabricio

Fabricio — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:59:17 +0000

interesting post, although i’m missing one thing which may play a big role when talking about external awards in combination with the xbox live achievement system (and “such”): making your achievements visible to others. there’s a difference between getting an award “silently” or getting an award which creates a kind of reputation and builds “identity” (by points, kind of award, …). in secound case, a new area opens up when thinking about comparing your achievements or rewards with others and –in an extreme case– judge people by their achievements. would be interesting to hear what you think about it.

By: Jesper

Jesper — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:33:11 +0000

@Jesse Thanks for raising the question – you’ve really got us talking.
It would be great with some more game-specific research on the subject too.

By: Jesse Schell

Jesse Schell — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:56:12 +0000

@Jesper et al: Thank you all for this useful discussion. I never thought a talk I wrote on the airplane on the way to DICE would get so much attention! By no means do I have any clear understanding of when extrinsic rewards are and are not effective. But as virtual economies can be more and more easily connected to the real world, I feel certain that hundreds of experiments will commence in this space. Seems like a good time for game designers to figure this out! I’m going to check out the Punished By Rewards book — it seems to have pointers to a great deal of research in this area. I had never thought very seriously about this issue before — thanks so much for raising it!

By: Adam Ruch

Adam Ruch — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:20:27 +0000

Hi Jesper and Co, I finally got around to listening to this speech, and I have to say, i find it terribly depressing because it moves so far in a direction I do not want to go. I had the same thought as Richard above concerning this all-purpose numerical exchange item, call them points or dollars or clams, they are all currency. Don’t we already do all this sort of thing? People already get paid to do market research, to advertise, to solve crimes, to do all sorts of things. I think his basic theory that we should all be paid for EVERYTHING we do is just weird, and I’m not sure it would be a step forward at all. Why would anyone sit down and work hard at any one thing in exchange for dollars when he can wander around performing meaningless, unrelated tasks casually and be ‘rewarded’ (which is somehow different to paid)? Rather than focusing and developing a profession or tradeskill, we instead are paid to buy things. His marketing-centric approach to the talk really made me cringe. If the ‘thing’ is worth paying money for, I don’t need any other external points system for doing it. If the novel is good, I will read it; if the novel is bad I don’t want to read it just for points. If the airfare is fair, I will pay it, I don’t need points… why not just make the service better or the price cheaper? He wants to layer a second economy over the top of the first one, and the only reason he suggests is to make millions of dollars for (presumably) people like him with the foresight to put these systems in place.

On another note, I find it interesting that (some) theorists seem to think that everything is becoming a game. A few decades ago, everything was a narrative…

Next note: I have a different understanding of the recent development in ‘casual’ games, which probably comes from reading your work, Jesper. Rather than this notion of ‘external’ and therefore more ‘real’ rewards in the form of achievement and points, I see that these systems are a means to an end that is alluded to in the comments above. We don’t want points, we want recognition and socialisation. The feeling of doing well at a task is (for many/most people) magnified when someone else (who understands the circumstances) sees you do it. Thus these artificial gamer scores that says to people who can’t possibly witness the event itself. You can basically export the milestones in your single-player experience and share with like-minded people in the gaming community. There’s no commercial exchange happening, only a cultural one. The reality of that kind of value doesn’t come from its location in relation to a fantasy game, it comes from its ability to generate recognition in a community. Its a codification of something that happens anyway amongst a community of people who socialise together. Putting a meta-score in everything in life would devastate our ability to socialise, because we’d be constantly looking for the most efficient way to get more points.

Players of different sports don’t need to be assigned generic scores that transcend the points systems of their various games in order to be recognised. What they get is money–which brings us back around to the first point. Everyone gets money as a marker of the significance of their professional contribution. Things we don’t do professionally don’t require the same reward structure for very good reasons (especially in our late-capitalist society). Sometimes we DON’T WANT TO BE WORKING. Talk to an ex-WoW player about the achievement system, and how that only magnified the feeling that Warcraft is like a second job…

Nowhere in this speech did art, creativity, expression, learning or socialisation come up. Of course, its a 30 minute presentation and he can’t possibly cover everything, but I feel like the ‘market’ doesn’t really need help from academics.

Ok, pulling the plug on this rant here.

By: Brennan Young

Brennan Young — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:55:27 +0000

If the hunter-gatherer tribe can satisfy itself by taking the fruit of one forest/savannah, it will not move on. Several generations may pass before the tribe gets ‘stuck’ in its environment, with accumulated sacred mythology and totemism, and the environment begins to be ‘used up’ (e.g. North American Dust Bowl or indeed any human-created desert region). The smarter humans invented crop rotation, which is the true key to human settlement – actually a way of reducing immediate rewards!

Vague hypothesis: Our satisfaction falls off if we are rewarded every time for doing The Right Thing because [human] survival depends on finding new strategies, new environments, new frontiers etc. This will also be true of other opportunist species like rats, foxes, pigeons, racoons etc.

I seem to remember some experiments with rats in skinner boxes. The rats would press the bar more avidly if the reward came only sometimes. If the reward came every time, the rats became blasé and only pressed the bar when they were actually hungry. If the reward was intermittent, the rats went into a frenzy of bar-pressing. It might have been pigeons.

I believe this mechanism is very powerful and is the basic ’cause’ of ludomania. Would you get hooked on a game of chance if you knew you could win every time? Scarcity is what hooks the punters, which is also why Burberry upped their prices: The teenage girls buying Burberry scarves for cheap were devaluing the brand.

BTW if anyone has a foil Charizard pokemon card, let me know. (JK)

[GODDAMMIT jesper . the spam filter this thing ALWAYS rejects my comments these days, and I have no clue why I should be more ‘fishy’ than the next man. Then the 15 second threshold invariably blocks my second attempt to post. Can’t you whitelist me? :)]

By: Jesper

Jesper — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:35:55 +0000

@Menno

Ah, yes, I was already mentioning the study of the children drawing.

I find the idea of “regulatory misfit” quite interesting.

But as far as I understand, there is a continued discussion about the relation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation – it’s not exactly a settled issue?

By: Menno Deen

Menno Deen — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 10:01:09 +0000

Also, the works of Lepper & Cordova (1996) show that there is no dichotomous relation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. In other words, intrinsic motivations do not decline at the same rate as extrinsic motivations (or external rewards) increase.

Cordova, D. I., & Lepper, M. R. (1996). Intrinsic Motivation and the Process of Learning: Beneficial Effects of Contextualization, Personalization, and Choice, Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(4), 715-730. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.library.uu.nl/science/article/B6WYD-46RVPMV-9/2/89b111b9288c506d06b4ce01b3abde6c