Achievements Considered Harmful?

1. Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful? http://www.flickr.com/photos/pe_ha45/1428040407/

4. Achievements Considered Harmful? Achievements Considered Harmful?

5. Achievements Considered Harmful Achievements Considered Harmful ? ?

6. 1. I am not a psychologist.

7. 2. The psychologists don’t agree. “Despite the seeming objectivity of this technique, these meta-analytic reviews reached markedly different conclusions.” http://www.behavior.org/education/bhan-24-1-1.pdf

8. 3. There are no direct studies. http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/21/magazine/1194833565213/immersion.html

9. Double Header Analysis: Xbox Live Achievement Data and Intellectual Property Trends in Video Games Geoffrey Zatkin and Jesse Divnich, EEDAR Friday 4:30pm — 5:30pm Room 130, North Hall

10. Disclaimer: This lecture is not about how to sell more games.

11. Confession: I ignore achievements while I’m playing games.

13. Alfie Kohn

15. Burrhus Frederic Skinner

16. “Pop Behaviorism”

17. Daniel Pink @ TED http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y

19. numbingly repetitive filled with anecdotes blatantly biased agendas

20. ten·den·tious also ten·den·cious (tn-dnshs) adj. Marked by a strong implicit point of view; partisan: a tendentious account of the recent elections.

21. But, they reference a lot of research.

22. However, it’s psychology research. “On the other hand, physicists like to say physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.” http://xkcd.com/435/

23. fMRI

25. Let’s talk about the research… The research shows that in most cases, extrinsic motivators are ineffective and actually decreaseintrinsic motivation on interesting tasks.

26. Studies covering… drawing puzzles IQ tests wearing seat belts trying new foods commissions & bonuses reading booksetc. Even thinking about rewards before task appears to do harm.

27. Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation Intrinsic Motivation appears to be superior: creativity problem solving quality speed

28. Categories tangible verbal symbolic informational controlling free-choice self-reported task- contingency non- engagement- completion-performance- endogenous exogenous transitory long-lasting expected unexpected dull interesting

29. Deci, Koestner, Ryan 1999

30. Deci, Koestner, Ryan 1999

31. Cameron, Banko, Pierce 2001

32. Skinner, 1953 - Deci, 1971 - 100’s of Others … Rummel and Feinberg, 1988 Wiersma, 1992 Cameron and Pierce, 1994 Tang and Hall, 1995 Eisenberger and Cameron, 1996 Deci, Koestner, Ryan, 1999 Cameron, Banko, Pierce, 2001

34. Hecker 1999

35. What they can agree on: For interesting tasks, • Tangible, Expected, Contingent Rewards Reduce Free-Choice IM • Verbal, Unexpected, Informational Feedback Increases Free-Choice & Self-Reported IM

36. Even just these two results are huge. How do they extend to games?

37. “Gameification” & “Pop Behaviorism” Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 Talk “We don’t have any issues with rewards that are even more tangible, like giving your kid money for a straight-A report card… as long as we are comfortable with who is setting up the reward and what criteria.” – Raph Koster

38. “Gameification” Jane McGonigal

39. “Gameification” & “Pop Behaviorism” “It would be brilliant if you got, say, money credited to your PSN account for finishing games - you know, a real-life reward. That'd get you playing.” - Mike Jackson, CVG UK

40. “Gameification” & “Pop Behaviorism”

41. I’m not saying these people are wrong. I don’t know. I’m saying there is a lot of data out there that implies they might be very wrong, and we need to study this to keep our art form healthy.

42. Games are the only art and entertainment form where the opportunity and mechanism for feedback is built into the form itself.

43. Note: These results are for “interesting tasks”. I was going to present the data for “dull tasks”…

44. Why are you making games? If you’re intentionally making dull games with variable ratio extrinsic motivators to separate people from their money, you have my pity. If you’re making intrinsically interesting games and want to make them even better, be very careful with extrinsic motivators.

45. Aristotle virtue ergon Rousseau amour-de-soi amour-propre Csikszentmihalyi autotelic

46. The Nightmare Self-Fulfilling Scenario 1. make an intrinsically interesting game, congratulations! 2. use extrinsic motivators to make your game better 3. destroy intrinsic motivation to play your game 4. metrics fetishism pushes you towards designs where EM works 5. BONUS: women lose even more IM than men do given EM!

47. Common Buts Players like them! Our data shows they work! We make lots of money! Just ignore them if you don’t like them! They show players different way of playing!

49. But, Just Ignore Them! But if all this research applies, players who aren’t ignoring them are (unwittingly) being affected by this IM reduction, which changes everything about the play environment.

50. I used to play Gears of War on-line. That game had a restriction where you couldn't get achievement points for on-line play unless you played ranked matches. I don't give a fuck about achievements, but I had to play ranked matches all the time anyways, because no good players would ever play unranked. But of course, ranked matches don't allow you to play with your friends, because that might aid you in cheating, so, you'd have to do ridiculous machinations to actually play a decent game with your friends (like trying to narrow the possible servers, then joining and unjoining games before they started until you saw your friend pop up on the board). Casey Muratori