Incentive System

I've blogged about life being basically the biggest, longest, and most varied open-world choose-your-own-adventure role-playing game, which it is. In life, you can do basically anything you want: unlock various skill trees, gather and manage resources, climb certain rank ladders, and/or spend far too much time playing mini-games. But there's one thing that bugs me about life being one big game, and it isn't the permadeath or the inability to load previous saves. It's the incentive systems.

Just about every good game out there has incentive systems that encourage or discourage certain player behavior. In Mario, players are encouraged to collect coins so they can increase their score and get 1ups. In Minecraft, players are encouraged to explore and/or mine in order to find interesting locations or rare materials. In life, what are we encouraged to do?

Some people are compelled by the urge to gather resources, particularly the most flexible resource: money. People spend hours each day performing boring, repetitive tasks because those tasks reward them with money. Some people work extra hard and in creative ways to earn even more money, which they then hoard or spend to get whatever perks we like. And earning money isn't really optional, either. We need money so we can exchange it for actual necessities, like food and shelter. Without enough money to buy the things we need, the game would end pretty quickly, and without enough money to exchange for our chosen perks, the game probably wouldn't be worth playing anyway, so we have an incentive to try to earn lots of money.

Yet, gathering money is ultimately pointless. Yes, it helps to extend the game time, but we can't extend the game indefinitely. Everyone sees the Game Over screen eventually, and when they do, all of their money and other material resources get left behind, so amassing as much money as possible isn't actually a winning strategy, even though the game gives us an incentive to do so.

We also have an incentive to have fun and to have other pleasant experiences, which is, after all, almost the entire point of playing any game. But some of the most fun experiences in life are also the most  physically or spiritually dangerous. For example, riding my bike quickly is more fun than riding it slowly, but it's also far more dangerous. And I probably don't need to tell you about the other things people do to have "fun" that also put their lives and souls in great danger.

There is, thankfully, also an incentive system in place to reward players for acting in ways that the Designer intended. Some perks can only be unlocked through good behavior, and those include some of the best perks in the game. These include the absolute best perk in the game, which, ironically, is only realized after one puts down the controller, which is actually part of the problem.

Most of the rewards for desired player behavior are only unlocked long after the player starts employing that behavior consistently, which is a serious problem. The average gamer has a terribly short attention span and gets bored easily. If the reward appears too long after the perform the desired behavior, or if they have to perform the behavior for too long before getting the reward, they might not automatically connect the reward with the action they performed to earn it, or they might not keep the behavior up long enough to earn the reward at all.

A reward system that rewards good players with perks eventually but also rewards the bad players with fun immediately is a bad incentive system. It gives players too much incentive to do the wrong things and too little incentive to do the right things. This might be okay for games in which the purpose is to see how the players would act, but if the goal is  to promote certain player behavior, then the system provides the player with far too much incentive to do other things.

I know that the Designer knows what He's doing, and I'm sure that He had good reasons for making the game the way it is, incentive system and all, but I think that, if it were up to me, I would have designed this game with a simpler, quicker, and less contradictory incentive system.