Achievements Unlocked

Giving someone pizza for every book they read doesn’t encourage literacy, but actually erodes their interest in reading and increases their interest in pizza. Similarly, when an employee’s only incentive for promotion is a pay rise, the reward tends to make them even more dissatisfied with their job. “You do things better when you want to do them,” explained Hecker, “rather than when you’re paid to do them.”

When an idea cuts against the grain of your tastes, it’s all too simple to dismiss, but that doesn’t mean there’s no truth to it. We all know people who’ll sink hours of their time into mediocre or even bad games to boost their Gamerscore or add a few more trophies to their virtual cabinet. If they buy a copy at retail, it sends a message of affirmation to its creators that can be used to justify future products of a similar quality. Publishers can also use services like Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network to get accurate metrics on how the audience spends its time, so even if the game is rented or plucked from a second-hand shop, that time investment can still become part of the “negative feedback loop” Hecker describes.

These extrinsic rewards turn gaming itself into a game, dulling the impact and importance of the intrinsic rewards that are part of every game. “You want to make an intrinsically interesting game,” Hecker said. “When you add extrinsic motivators, if these studies do apply to games, you’re destroying intrinsic motivation to play your game… Extrinsic motivators will lead you towards dull tasks, and you’re totally [cornering] yourself into designing shitty games that you have to pay people to play.”

Take an online FPS as an example. If the designer includes an achievement for killing 20 people with frag grenades in multiplayer, it guarantees every game will have someone randomly throwing grenades to get those kills. The intrinsic features of the game’s design don’t encourage this; the external rewards system shifts the emphasis away from the designer’s intentions, and actively promotes behaviour that disrupts the play experience. “If this research applies, then players who aren’t ignoring [achievements] are unwittingly being affected by this intrinsic motivation reduction,” Hecker said, “which changes everything about the play environment for everybody.”

Sony and Microsoft now demand that every game released on their consoles incorporate these external rewards systems, and it’s not difficult to find examples where they simply don’t fit. Heavy Rain, for example, features a scene where Scott Shelby has to make scrambled eggs for Lauren, and the player is awarded a trophy for cooking them correctly. David Cage has spoken openly about his desire for Heavy Rain to shun the use of classic gaming values like challenge and points as intrinsic motivators. The whole point of Heavy Rain is that winning and losing don’t apply, but you still get a bronze medal for cooking scrambled eggs, as well as for other, seemingly self-directed tasks.

When these quiet moments aren’t allowed to blend into the whole experience, the entire concept is undermined. Heavy Rain is an exceptional case, of course, but as Hecker points out, the future will inevitably throw up further examples with increasing regularity. In a reply article for Gamasutra, the eminent videogame academic and designer Ian Bogost expressed similar concerns. The best games, he argued, aren’t motivated by ego-stroking rewards, but the process by which the player attains them. External rewards systems can only serve to undermine what makes play so gratifying. “When people act because incentives compel them toward particular choices,” he wrote, “they cannot be said to be making choices at all.”

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