This Psychological Trick Makes Rewards Backfire

So in the 1970s, there was this experiment where a bunch of kids were told to draw some pictures. But before that, the children were split into groups. One group was told that that they would receive a reward at the end, while the second group had no reward. After the drawings were finished, the researchers continued to watch the kids in their classroom for a couple weeks - and the results were pretty interesting. And not just "the unanticipated arrival of a goat in the classroom".

*Goat bleat* But I'll come back to that - because I should explain what this has got to do with game design. Often in design, we want to motivate players. Perhaps motivate them to learn a new mechanic, or encourage them to use a specific feature, or just get them to play the game for longer. And a popular solution for this is the goal… and reward. Do this, get that. Like, quests that lead to experience points. Challenges that unlock cosmetics.

And those cheeky Xbox achievements which are both a goal and a reward in one tidy package. But I'm here to tell you that goals and rewards don't always work how you want them to. And, in fact, in this video I'm going to explain how they can even have the complete, opposite effect…

When Klei was making the initial prototype for its sandbox survival game Don't Starve, they quickly realised that testers had no idea how to play the game - and they instantly became stuck. So the testers were given a few hints - and once they got over the hump, they were able to experiment, explore, and started to have a lot of fun. In response, Klei decided to create a series of small, tutorial-like quests to help players get started.

Survive this many nights. Find this many items. That sort of thing. And it worked! But only so much as players learned how to play the game. Because beyond that, the quests were a complete and utter disaster. Klei discovered that players focused exclusively on those quests, and thought of everything else as a noisy distraction. They optimised their play in really boring ways in order to finish the quest at hand. They avoided doing anything risky, because it meant they might fail.

And then they became completely demotivated the second the quests ran out. Klei says "In structuring the game as a series of explicit tasks to be completed, we taught the player to depend upon those tasks to create meaning in the game". In the end, Klei solved its onboarding problem by tweaking the UI to give players subtle hints about how to get started - such as highlighting the most important items you can craft. But the quests were left on the cutting room floor - leaving players to learn for themselves.

Because if a game is about experimentation, exploration, or player-guided discovery - explicit goals can limit a player's creativity and imagination. Even after the goals run out. This is exactly what drove the development of the cosmic archeology game Outer Wilds. The developers deliberately avoided giving players explicit goals about where to go, or even what you're trying to achieve - so that players are driven to explore this miniature solar system through a sense of curiosity alone.

Okay, here's another story. Zach Barth makes problem-solving puzzle games about designing your own automated machines, like Exapunks and Shenzen I/O. In these games, you can make the machines however you like - if it works, it works. But it's actually really fun to go back in, and see if you can refine your creation to make it, say, smaller or faster. So in Zach's first two commercial games, Spacechem and Infinifactory, he added a few Steam achievements that encourage this sort of optimisation - like the Spacechem achievement "Beat the assignment "No Thanks Necessary" in under 2200 cycles."

But, in all the games released after that - those achievements are completely gone. What's up with that? ZACH: "We wanted to add achievements because that was back when achievements were cool. That was back before I thought achievements were awful." ZACH: "The thing i don't like about them is that the game already has a reward system. We have something that's far more meaningful and far less arbitrary than a random threshold."

What Zach's talking about is a bounty of metrics that you can use to gauge how well you've done. There's your own personal score. There's leaderboards that compare you to your Steam friends. And there are these brilliant histograms that show you how your solution stacks up in comparison to every other player. All of these - the strive to beat your personal best, or the drive to do better than other players - are extremely strong motivators to do better.

As Zach says: "a goal that you set yourself is way more powerful than a goal someone else sets for you". So if a game is about improving yourself, a personal or social goal can be a stronger motivator than a set threshold.

My final story comes from the adorable track-laying puzzle game Mini Metro. The game's developers wanted to focus on personal growth and high scores. And so - according to UI designer Jamie Churchman - the team specifically tried to avoid these goal and reward meta structures as they can become a "means to an end". For example, the game does have unlockable cities - which is just to limit player choice at the beginning of the game.

But Jamie acknowledges that some people will play each city until the threshold, unlock the next one, and when they've unlocked all the cities they feel like they've finished the game and can stop playing. We should remember that goals are a checklist that can be completed. And like with Don't Starve, some players will exclusively rely on the game to give them purpose and direction. But measurements of your skill - such as leaderboards and scoring systems, have no finish: you can continue to improve on your personal best forever - which partly explains why we can still play Tetris after three decades.

To truly understand what's happening here, we need to take a quick detour into the world of behavioural psychology. When thinking about motivation, one of the most popular models is the idea of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. To make it simple, extrinsic motivation is when we are doing a task for reasons beyond the task itself - usually in order to receive a reward. Or, as that's better known: a job. On the other hand, intrinsic motivation is when we do a task for its own sake, simply because we find it enjoyable or meaningful.

Or, as that's better known: a hobby. Intrinsic motivation is shown to be far stronger - and it lasts longer too. People can enjoy a hobby for a lifetime. Extrinsic motivation will only last as long as the rewards are there. Just see if someone will still work in your factory after you stop paying them. And this bring us back to that classroom from earlier. Okay, so the point of the study was that the kids had already shown interest in drawing before the study began.

They were intrinsically motivated. Then, they were asked to make a picture - and, like I said, one group was promised a reward, and the second group wasn't. Afterwards, the researchers continued to watch the kids in their classroom for a couple weeks and found that the children who received a reward for their drawing? Well, they showed much less interest in drawing afterwards. And their pictures were of a lower quality too.

Which is - wow, way to burn a bunch of kids, science. This is called the overjustification effect. And there's a huge body of evidence that says when extrinsic motivation is attached to a task that we already find intrinsically motivating, we suddenly become way less interested in the task. And other studies show rewards also make people less creative, worse at problem solving, more prone to cheating, and may lose motivation entirely once the rewards stop - even though previously they were happy to do it for its own sake!

Whoops!

And I think we can apply this idea to game design. Because there are certainly games that lean more towards intrinsic motivation. Like games that focus on exploration, creativity, expression, and growth. There are games where you set your own goals and expect no rewards in return. And so when more extrinsically motivating systems - like explicit goals, progression meters, and achievements - are added to these games, our motivation can take a hit.

We become blinkered to creative solutions. We're less motivated to improve ourselves. We put an arbitrary threshold on how much we attain. And developers now need to create a constant drip feed of new goals and rewards, or risk losing us entirely.

Of course, that's not to say that developers should never add goals and rewards to these more intrinsically motivating games. Because, I think it's clear that some people just aren't very good or interested in motivating themselves. For every Minecraft super fan who generates their own fun, there's someone else who is simply lost and without direction. It reminds me of my all-time favourite Steam forum post. In a thread about the open-ended whodunnit Her Story, one user said "It's up to you to decide when you are satisfied with the information you have found".

To which the thread's author replied, "how do I decide when I am satisfied?". That post keeps me up at night. Anyway - the nice thing about goals and rewards is that they can provide structure and progression to play. So they can still be used, they just have to be applied carefully. For example, with goals - it's better to use large, overarching goals that players can complete however they want, rather than restrictive step-by-step instructions.

You can focus on comparative metrics, like leaderboards, histograms, and personal bests, rather than absolute thresholds. Make goals optional, like Hitman's challenges, or hidden, like Outer Wilds' achievements.

And in terms of rewards - well, actually there is one type of reward that has been shown to not trigger the overjustification effect. Because, in that study with the children - there was actually a third group: children that were simply told to go off and draw - but then were given a reward at the end, as a surprise. In the following weeks, these children spent the largest amount of time drawing… of all - if only by a small margin beyond the kids without rewards.

This, and plenty of other studies, show that rewards can have a motivational effect in intrinsic situations - provided that they're unexpected, reasonably low value, and feel tied to the actual performance of the action. An example of this in games might be Overwatch's Play of the Game, which is a short highlight reel showcasing the best moment in the match. It doesn't really do anything, but it's a huge boost to the ego of the player who gets the starring role.

And this is all over Nintendo's latest blockbusters. In Odyssey, there's nothing telling you to clamber up here with Mario's advanced move-set: but here's a cheeky cache of coins as a pat on the back. And in Breath of the Wild, every suspicious nook could be a reward, like a Korok seed. As Nintendo's Bill Trinen says: "When they create their games, [Nintendo's designers] don't tell you how to play their game in order to achieve some kind of mythical reward.

There are things you can do in the game that will result in some sort of reward or unexpected surprise. In my mind, that really encourages the sense of exploration rather than the sense of 'If I do that, I'm going to get some sort of artificial point or score:.