Can rewards demotivate players?
A story about how I’ve stopped being a god of war and become a rat in the maze.
God of War: Ragnarok was the first game I wanted to play on my newly bought PlayStation 5. Heck, it even was one of the main reasons for my purchase.
I wasn’t disappointed. Santa Monica Studio made a remarkably polished game—admiring the details of characters' clothes or finding tiny details in the environment was a pleasure by itself. I enjoyed the story and its tone, set somewhere between a myth, fairy tale, and modern blockbuster cinema. Combat was insanely satisfying, making me feel the strength of Kratos, even if I didn’t master all the moves and possibilities.
But there is something I don’t love about God of War: Ragnarok — how it constantly wanted to reward me.
In this game, the player gets some loot after combat, but even more rewards come from exploration and opening crates scattered among the levels.
It sounds like a good idea, especially since the game has a Metroidvania structure. This means that some parts of the map are inaccessible until a new gear or ability makes them possible to reach (often with some convenient shortcut). This encourages players to explore the map and return to previously played levels to gather new rewards.
But even during the first playthrough of the level, I usually get quite a lot of stuff. A few steps aside from the main path and, boom, here it is, a shiny, glowing crate hiding something valuable. Crates are huge (like everything in God of War), and opening them comes with a very satisfying animation of the hero using a great deal of force to open it or even blast through its lid. There are a few types of them; some require a simple puzzle to open, and some do not. Some are very common; others have more legendary items.
It doesn’t sound like a controversial feature, right? With such a reward system, some games would try to take real money out of players’ pockets. However, as a premium, single-player experience promoting PlayStation, God of War: Ragnarok doesn’t lower itself to such a rip-off (and praise for that!).
However, despite the good intentions of the creators, rewards distorted my experience with the game. I started fully immersed, feeling like a mythological hero exploring the Norse world. But after some time, I felt more like a rat in a maze rushing from one reward to another.
I stopped caring that much about the environment and just looked for the shining glance of the next piece of loot. Crates were hidden, but my mind quickly adapted to it and almost intuitively knew where to search for them. They broke my immersion not only because their presence in the world usually wasn’t justified well enough but also because I didn’t feel like I’d earned those rewards.
Besides that, rewarding players for looking at every corner of the level triggers some „gamer OCD.” Adrian Chmielarz neatly explained that in an article called Game Openings are Important, or the First 300 Seconds of Bioshock Infinite. It contains a beautiful drawing that says more than a thousand words about this issue:
Of course, God of War: Ragnarok or Bioshock Infinite (which served as the example for Chmielarz) aren’t the only games that can be criticized for that. It’s the opposite; they are examples of very good games, which makes such “gamey” mechanisms stick out more than usual. We expect such games to reward us with great stories, amazing vistas, or exciting challenges, not artificial coins and virtual points.
However, single-player games are only the tip of the iceberg. Games that rely on maintaining users for a long time (so-called GAAS or game-as-a-service) actually push the barrier much further, making rewards a separate layer of experience (e.g., season pass), which isn’t connected that much with HOW we play, but HOW OFTEN we play. It’s the gamification of an act of playing itself.
Gamification was invented to make boring stuff (like working, exercising, or buying) more interesting by using mechanisms taken from games (points, levels, quests, etc.). Thanks to it, Duolingo can motivate us to do our Spanish exercises by evoking the fear of losing a streak of daily activity. Or a sports app can convince us to work out more by tempting us to complete an achievement.
The paradox is that some games use mechanisms popularized by gamification but not in the gameplay itself (as it used to be, originally). So, playing the game is merely a means to progress in the metagame, outside of the game’s core loop. Leveling the rank to unlock new cosmetic items becomes more important than what we do to unlock them.
But are rewards always an effective way to motivate players?
Researchers do not share a unanimous opinion about it, but there are enough voices against it to at least put this assumption in doubt.
In the ‘70s, Edward Deci claimed that external rewards decrease our intrinsic motivation for a task1. Jesper Juul, in his article Demotivation by External Awards, wrote about ”a famous 1973 experiment2 that showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.”
He also brought a great quote from the book Punished by Rewards:
“In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.”
There is also very interesting research from 2016 that suggests that although rewards may work for less motivated players, they may backfire for players who are already enjoying a game.
The research was called The Motivational Push of Games3. It was an 11-day study of a game for training executive functioning, with players split into two groups.
Players who identified less with their in-game avatar (thus were less involved in the game) had their motivation wane quicker than in the other group. However, they positively responded by including a reward after a week of playing—their effort and results improved.
For players who identified more with avatars, the effect was completely opposite: their effort and performance dropped.
Those are only a few examples of research that put the effect of rewards in doubt, and you can easily find more. However, to be frank, some researchers claim the opposite – in some research papers4, it is claimed that both rewards and intrinsic motivation positively influence performance and will to do the task.
I don’t have enough time or knowledge to give a decisive judgment about the impact of rewards on motivation. What I want to do instead is to undermine the common assumption that rewards are necessary for a player to keep playing. During game development, I sometimes have been a part of discussions about increasing the number of rewards or strengthening their meaning. But I don’t recall ANY situation in which somebody would argue that rewards in our game can, in fact, make players less engaged. And research says that it is, at least, a possible scenario.
Gaming is not the only field in which rewards and motivation are important. One of them is education, in which the attitude towards rewards has changed. There is a trend in modern educational methods (e.g., Montessori) not to praise children for the effects of their work but for the process itself. Saying that they have drawn a beautiful picture sounds harmless, but it may teach children to focus more on praise than enjoyment of the activity itself. Moreover, kids may be less creative, being afraid that they won’t achieve the same result for the second time if they don’t repeat what they have already done.
When we have intrinsic motivation, we can enjoy the activity itself. But when rewards come, a desire to achieve only a certain effect may become dominant.
I know that I can be demotivated by rewards. Maybe not in the short-term loop, as it’s difficult to stop the game when another reward is just behind the corner. But after I finally stop playing, another reflection may come: Was this time really well spent? I often have such regrets after scrolling through social media, and I have them after playing something that is just an addictive form without substance.
To be clear, I’m not talking about God of War here. I found enough meaning in the game story, challenge in the game mechanics, or immersion in the game world to feel that it was a time well spent. But I don’t think that chasing from chest to chest to get more rewards was an especially good part of this experience.
God of War: Ragnarok is a story about maturing into an adult. Maybe it’s high time game developers did the same. Giving treats looks like an easy way to earn love, but does it work in the long term? Everybody loves candies… until they eat too many.
“Effects of externally mediated rewards on intrinsic motivation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 18, no. 1 (1971)
E.g. “Intrinsic motivation, external reward, and their effect on overall motivation and performance”