hey folks before we get started I need to announce a couple of things first off
I'm very sad to say that our artist alison has decided to step down and
leave the show at least for now
we've all been trying to figure out how to juggle schedules and workloads these
past months but the truth is with her new job it was just too much work
sometimes real life just have to take priority you know we hate seeing her go
but we're really excited for and which are the best of luck
maybe something her workload will even out and she'll be able to jump back in
either way it's been an absolute pleasure and we are grateful for
everything
which brings me to a happier announcement we have a new member on the
team
Scott do it will be joining lily is our new official artist so make him feel
welcome
all right that's enough news let's talk about a video game or something - too rarely
when playing games do we ask the question why why are we doing the things
that we do what makes us want to play this part of the game not on some large
philosophical level not asking some big question about why we play though that
could be a great topic for an episode too but rather in the specific
why am I bashing this monster right now why do I care to watch this cutscene
it's one of the most important questions we can ask both as players and as
designers yet it's very often overlooked so though we've talked about it a little
bit here and there in other episodes we thought we'd explore this in a bit more
depth thus today we're going to talk about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards
usually these terms are applied to a game as a whole intrinsic rewards are
rewards within the game
new challenges new levels more stories etc and extrinsic rewards are rewards
that exists outside the game itself like money in poker or playing ddr to lose
weight but this is too broad view of the concept we need to look at something
more specific and far more important we need to look at each moment of play
it's an interesting question when playing a game to ask at any given
moment
am i doing the activity i'm doing for the activity itself or am i doing it for
some other reason for example for me i played through the fights and final
fantasy 7 in order to get access to more of the story
the activity of actually doing the fights themselves wasn't all that
engaging it wasn't when I was playing them for rather i was waiting through
them because i had to in order to get something else I wanted another good
example of this is World of Warcraft and wow I've been conditioned to want
certain pieces of gear so I would grind solely to get that gear but the problem
was just that I was grinding to get gear
not for the joy of grinding itself if instead of looking at games as a whole
and asking whether their rewards are extrinsic or intrinsic we look at each
element of plan ask this
the question becomes so much more enlightening in the preceding examples
the rewards are all extrinsic
if i look at grinding in 10 or combat and final fantasy 7 in isolation
if I strip away all the other elements of those games I see that they're not
that rewarding in and of themselves that the only reason we do them as for the
externalities
whereas if i look at something like combat and bayonetta puzzles and
professor layton or jumping across platforms in a mario game
heck even if we look at experiencing the narrative in a good final fantasy or
making a really meaningful dialogue choice and mass effect of the which are
walking dead
these are activities that we do for themselves their rewards are
self-contained intrinsic to the activity we're doing as designers we should
always be asking this question because optimal game design means having every
activity be meaningful in and of itself having each part of your game being
engaging rather than simply being a gating mechanism to keep the player from
to quickly consuming the reward they really want this isn't always possible
optimal game design isn't real world game design but we should always be
shooting for it and we should always always be conscious of it as players I
think it's a worthwhile consideration as well
upon thinking about it I realized how many levels I have beaten how many
monsters I've slain how many treasures I've collected that I just wasn't really
interested in that were merely stepping stones to something else in the game
that I wanted and of late has helped me to put down games that I wasn't actually
that interested in it helped me to say
no actually this isn't fair I'm not going through 20 hours of doing an
activity i'm not really interested in you can drip feed me the tiny piece i
actually want which has led me to having a much more satisfying experience with
games in general it's allowed me in my limited gaming time to really play the
things that I find a joy to play
that's not to say that those tiny drip fed things aren't sometimes worth it
there are many RPGs where the extrinsic motivation of the characters in the
world were more than worth the slog through the part I didn't find
inherently engaging like an persona 4 for example but just thinking about
games this way has helped me to make that assessment to better choose when
those extrinsic elements are worth it and not invest time in a game i'm not
one hundred percent engaged by when there are so many other amazing games
out there to play
so look at each part of a game in isolation ask yourself is this engaging
by itself
am I playing through it for something outside of the actions i'm currently
taking
and if not wonder how these sections might be made engaging
is there anything inherent in the rest of the experience that would be lessened
by making any individual component worth doing in and of itself
they're almost never is for example let's take the kingdom hearts series and
side by side it with final fantasy in kingdom hearts
I love the world I love the characters in the story when it's not being
completely stupid and
also find myself wanting to play the combat sometimes i go fight things in
that game just for the fun of fighting them they managed to make the engagement
in combat intrinsic without taking away from any of the other parts of the game
in an ideal world every part of every game you play would be intrinsically
engaging that will never happen but we should be aware of it when it falls
apart because we play for joy
we play to be engaged in to be entertained we don't play merely to kill
hours in our day so we should always be conscious of the parts of our games that
are doing just that it will help you design better games and it will help
pull you out of a skinner box or our other game design psychological traps or
on those rare days where you do just want to make the hours disappear it will
tell you what games to turn to.
See you next week!
yeah