作者：chrishecker

在2010年的游戏开发者大会上，我的演讲“成就系统是否会造成不良影响”涉及了关于游戏成就的相关争论，并始终强调了我对于这个问题的“疑惑”。似乎当今的游戏产业正在慢慢倾向于提供给玩家一些带有奖励的游戏，而我想也是时候针对各种类型的奖励机制造成的影响进行一定的研究。为了达到“公正”与“平衡”，我深入研究了数据可显示的内容以及数据未曾揭露的各个方面。

achievements considered harmful(from flickr)

不幸的是，有一些心理学家对于奖励是否能够影响激励提出了异议，而我也在这次的研讨会上花了一点时间与他们讨论这个问题。心理学是科学领域中的一个软肋， 说得好听一点就是在这个领域中，人们（包括学术学者）经常会为自己设定一个主张或者有自己的见解，并且他们会按照自己的主张或者意见去理解数据。这就是人 类的本性，当然了，生活中也处处存在着这种证实偏见，但是在阅读了一些相关的学术文章后，我想到的更多是学校中的呐喊比赛而非同行评议中的调查活动。

重点

为了不让自己陷入错综复杂的场面，我决定关注于两种不同的结果，并假设它们都是正确的。

对于有趣的任务而言，

1.有形的，受期待的，偶然的奖励能够减少那些自由选择的内在动机；

2.无形的，意外的，有情报的回馈则能够提高自由选择以及自我报告的内在动机。

我将在以下的内容中定义这些术语，并且我也会即时更新相关内容。

首先便是最让人忧心的一点，这与游戏奖励那些有所成就的玩家的一些方法类似。我多次重申如今并不存在关于游戏成就的相关研究，即使有一些研究是用于挖掘玩家玩游戏的内在动机，但是我认为只要你看到那一大堆可用的数据后，便不再对此进行争论了，这时候应该会有许多人争先赞助这种调查活动。而微软研究院则是最佳人选，因为他们拥有Xbox Live（游戏邦注：是微软为其游戏主机Xbox所提供的网络服务，这里汇聚了大量有用的数据，并且有能力计算出每一个平台的寿命长短）以及许多聪明的心理学家。所以我真切地希望微软研究院能够听到我的呼唤。

在讨论了“有趣的任务”的结果之后，也是在我将要讨论“无趣的任务”之前，我要先问一个问题：

你为何要制作游戏？

如果你是故意在游戏中添加一些灵活的外在动机，以此去从玩家手中赚钱的话，那么我真的很同情你。

而如果你是在制作一些真正有内涵的游戏，并努力去把它们做得更好，从而引出外在动机，那么这真的是一个让人赞许的好方法。

在结束演讲之前，我列举了以下几种针对游戏的调查研究可能引发的结果：

1.制作一款富有内涵的游戏，恭喜你！

2.使用外在动机去更好地完善你的游戏

3.破坏游戏的内在动机

4.盲目地迷恋参数让你更倾向于设计外在动机机制

5.奖励：比起男性玩家，女性玩家更青睐于外部动机而非内在动机。

谁知道势态会不会朝这个方向发展，但是对我来说既然这里充满潜力，我们就更不应该盲目向前，而是对此展开深入的研究。

在演讲中我也指出了一些常见的因素：

玩家喜欢这些动机！

我们的数据表明这些动机都很有效！

我们因此赚了很多钱！

如果你不喜欢这些动机就忽略它们吧！

它们可以展现玩家不同的游戏玩法！

我反反复复地检查了这些因素，并尝试着去罗列出核心要点。

最后，我想谈谈，当游戏要求玩家必须去争取成就和奖励时，你应该如何做才能使损害减少到最低程度。你也许知道，我正在致力于开发一款独立的侦探游戏《SpyParty》，而因为有很多平台拥有者正在要求游戏缩减成就机制，所以我决定采取一些方法去执行奖励机制，并将伤害程度降低到最低：

不要将这些奖励机制夸张化。

使用一些意想不到的奖励。

使用一些绝对而非相对的措施。

使用一些内在的奖励。

让这些激励更具有信息性而非控制性。

再次地，依据这些建议获得的相关数据能够帮助减少内在动机，但是前提是你必须能够按照这些建议去落实行动。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Achievements Considered Harmful?

“The intrinsic reward for knifing dudes is knifing dudes.”

I waded into the debate on game achievements with my lecture at the 2010 Game Developers Conference titled Achievements Considered Harmful?, with a strong emphasis on the “?”. Since the game industry seems to be careening head first into a future of larding points and medals and cute titles on players for just starting up a video game, I wanted to raise awareness of the large body of research studying the impact on motivation from various types of rewards. Trying to be “fair and balanced”, I delved into what the data show and what they don’t show.

Sadly, there is a contentious debate amongst psychologists about how rewards affect motivation, and I spend a bunch of time in the talk discussing this debate. Psychology is at the soft end of science, to put it mildly, and so it’s easy for people—including academics—to have an agenda or opinion and “interpret” the data in a way that backs up that agenda or opinion. This is human nature, of course, and confirmation bias is everywhere in life, but reading some of the papers reminds me more of a schoolyard yelling contest than of peer reviewed research.

Highlights

To hack my way out of the thicket, I focused on the two results that both sides seem to begrudgingly agree are true.

For interesting tasks,

1.Tangible, expected, contingent rewards reduce free-choice intrinsic motivation, and

2.Verbal, unexpected, informational feedback, increases free-choice and self-reported intrinsic motivation.

I define all these terms in the slides below, and I’ll fill out this page more as time goes on.

The first is the scary one, since it seems to have a lot in common with the ways games reward players with achievements and the like. I reiterated many times that there are no studies that I’m aware of on achievements for games, but if they really could be sapping intrinsic motivation to play games—and I can’t see how you can argue with the possibility this is true after looking at the mountain of available data—then I think somebody should start funding research into this. I think Microsoft Research would be the perfect people to do this work, since they have both Xbox Live (meaning a great source of data, and a vested interest in figuring out the truth for the longevity of the platform) and a bunch of smart psychologists on staff. Hopefully they’ll heed my call.

After talking about the results for “interesting tasks”, I ask the following question when I pondered covering the results for “dull tasks”:

Why are you making games?

If you’re intentionally making dull games with variable ratio extrinsic motivators to separate people from their money, you have my pity.

If you’re making intrinsically interesting games and want to make them even better, be very careful with extrinsic motivators.

Towards the end of the talk, I outline a potential Nightmare Scenario based on all the implications of the research going the wrong way for games:

1.make an intrinsically interesting game, congratulations!

2.use extrinsic motivators to make your game better

3.destroy intrinsic motivation to play your game

4.metrics fetishism pushes you towards designs where extrinsic motivation works

5.BONUS: women lose even more intrinsic motivation than men do given extrinsic motivation!

Who knows whether things will actually go this way, but it seems clear to me that the potential is there, and so we should look into this more instead of blindly moving forward.

In the talk I also address a bunch of the Common Buts:

Players like them!

Our data shows they work!

We make lots of money!

Just ignore them if you don’t like them!

They show players different ways of playing!

I go through each of these in turn, trying to address the core of the point.

Finally, I talk a bit about how to Minimize the Damage, if you’re forced to have achievements and rewards in your games. As you may know, I’m working on an indie spy game called SpyParty, and since some platform holders currently require you to give away achievements to pass certification, I gathered a list of ways of implementing rewards so they do less harm:

Don’t make a big fuss about them.

Use unexpected rewards.

Use absolute, not relative measures.

Use endogenous rewards.

Make them informational, not controlling.

Again, the data shows even following this advice reduces intrinsic motivation, but it’s at least something you can do. I talk about this in more detail in the slides below.

Metrics Fetishism

I had a section here about the trend I have started calling metrics fetishism, but it was long enough that I moved it to its own page.

Materials

I usually just dump a ppt and mp3 up here, but I decided I’d try something fancier this time. After searching far and wide for a good tool for putting presentations online, I found MyPlick, which is a silly name, and the site is unquestionably ugly, but the tools for syncing your slides to audio are really great compared to all the others[1], and their player is simple and efficient and not bogged down with menus and whatnot.

So, here you go:

If you’re on a phone that won’t play Flash, or want to listen to my dulcet tones on your Walkman/iPod/whatever-the-kids-are-using-these-days, or you just want to study my poorly constructed PowerPoint deck, here you go（source:chrishecker）