Practical Lessons from Games: Rewards
Whether it is the singular distinction of being “the winner,” access to additional content, or monetary in nature, every game benefits from a reward system. Certainly, games are played because they are enjoyable, but the reward is what makes any task within a game worthy of the time and effort spent. For shorter games, there may only be a single pay-off at the end. More involved games will likely have multiple, relatively small rewards building up to the end game finale. Such rewards are typically in-game, giving you more lives, more power, new abilities, better equipment, or allowing access to other areas of the game.
Then there are games like World of Warcraft (WoW), in which the game never actually ends. Such games must incorporate many different reward systems to keep players engaged. In a relatively recent patch, for instance, WoW added “Achievements” that keep track of all manner of things you can do in the game that aren’t actually necessary to progress. You collect achievements completely for the sake of collecting them—there is no benefit to your character. It is a surprisingly effective mechanic that adds yet one more layer of gameplay onto an already rich environment.
Such reward systems have only rarely been included in business applications. For example, Quicken will congratulate you every time one of your accounts balances. This isn’t particularly compelling, but imagine if it were taken a few steps further. First, pick a behavior that you want to encourage in your product—say, saving money. Set a goal, or allow the user to set one. In the case of saving money, the goal could be a significant purchase, or it could simply be a continuously tracked metric, such as setting aside $100 a month. Now assign a reward. If the goal is a significant purchase, that is the reward. For a continuous goal, there should be various levels at which the user is rewarded, some of them with small rewards and larger rewards at longer intervals. To keep the goal forefront in the user’s mind, visualize their progress.
This approach could be applied to software development, secretarial duties, lab work, education—practically any job that utilizes computer software and has trackable metrics. Sales people are already compensated in rewards-based systems. It doesn’t even have to be that tangible. Hybrid vehicles have incorporated rewards to encourage efficient driving behaviors.
Rewards are powerful motivators that can be used to advantage in software applications. They can encourage good behaviors, and sometimes just make otherwise boring tasks more enjoyable.
