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Reward Moments

Throughout the process of developing a new activity/fitness game, I’ve been thinking a lot about rewards mechanics and specifically those related to game systems of any variety.  Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the way that most badging / achievement systems are designed, but when done right it can be a very powerful motivator.  

XBox Live more or less invented the platform for digital games to reward players for certain “achievements,” and foursquare has most successfully brought the concept into the real world.  

Recently, there has been a lot of writing and thinking about these systems, and even some interesting meta-games that are providing their own commentary.  But I think one of the best single things I’ve read, that most clearly mirrors what I’ve been thinking about this stuff was by Buster Benson, who is building a interesting health/behavior mod game/tool called healthmonth.  Here’s what he writes:

But, if I am thinking about this correctly, it confirms a hunch that I’ve had for a while, that points/badges/etc are value-less in and of themselves.  They gain their value from the intrinsic rewards (or lack thereof) that they point to.  Getting the Swarm Badge on Foursquare is only valuable insofar as it is valuable to be at a big event, and to feel like you belong to such an event.  If you gain no intrinsic value from that experience, the badge is worthless.  If you do gain value from it, then it has that much value.  And, in what explains the magic power of the whole phenomenon, the badge is actually the most tangible and real representation of the otherwise intangible, intrinsic, value of the experience.

This idea may seem obvious.  It’s the reason that Boy Scout Merit Badges are called *Merit* Badges.  You do something.  You learn something.  You feel good about it.  The badge you get stitched on the sash is the representation of all of those feelings.  It’s like a photograph.  The photograph may not capture every feeling and every nuance of a situation, but it acts as a placeholder for a memory, for a moment.  That’s what foursquare badges do when they are at their most effective, and that’s what most XBox titles don’t do very well.  There’s not a lot of intrinsic value to finding every goddamn hidden token that a game designer has dispersed across a huge virtual world.  At some level of grinding, most of the can-do spirit in the game world has left the building.  And what about the service Miso, which gives you badges for checking into television shows!?  Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not at my highest self-esteem levels when I’m watching TV, and it seems like getting a little 100X100 pixel, poorly designed icon telling me I’ve accomplished something by watching Desperate Housewives of New Jersey is not going to feel all that cool.

This is why I mainly cringe when I see things like Big Door, which is a API that allows web developers to “gamify” their websites.  While potentially there could be good things that come of this, mostly what I see is empty game mechanics that might enable you to give a loyal customer a free slurpee, but nothing really new or interesting.  Plus, these kind of extrinsic rewards systems have already been around for years!  

To me, successful digital rewards have to be about moments, like photographs.  It seems simple enough: try and figure out how to capture moments where people have done something cool, and give them something that acts as a pointer to the real feelings they had when that cool thing was done.  That’s what Foursquare does when it’s on it’s game.

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