Rewards: Decide What Repays a Player's Attention
Technical terms: Reward
A reward is anything that makes the costs of play feel worthwhile. It may occur inside the puzzle—insight, challenge, beauty, excitement, expression, social connection—or persist beyond it as memory, mastery, friendship, recognition, status, money, or a saved creation.
Calling a puzzle “fun” hides these differences. Name the particular reward and you can begin designing for it.
See it in a crossword
A difficult crossword can reward insight, knowledge, completion, appreciation of elegant construction, visible improvement, and later conversation. A streak adds a different reward outside the individual solve and may eventually compete with the pleasure of solving.
What you can do with it
Identify what you want players to value before attaching points or badges. Every formal reward teaches people what officially counts. Social recognition can redirect play as strongly as scoring, even when it looks gentler.
List five rewards your puzzle already offers without adding anything. Remove “winning” and “completion” from the list and look again.
Ask a player
What made the time feel worthwhile, even if you never showed the result to anyone?
Nearby ideas
- Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation — distinguish enjoyment of the activity from separable incentives.
- Reward schedule — determine when external reinforcement arrives.
- Orthogame — decide whether the game formally ranks performance.
- Social metagame — extend reward through recognition and shared discussion.
Elias, Garfield, and Gutschera, Characteristics of Games (2012), Chapter 6, section 6.2, pp. 174–178. ---