The Effect of Rewards

Rewards are important
Rewards are very important in games. Rewards form one of the motivations to play the game. But you have to design your rewards carefully. Rewards have to be in balance with the achievements of the player. If it is easy to receive a big rewards, and a bit later in the game you do a lot of work and get only a small reward for it, players get frustrated.

A bad example
Players are picky about the rewards they receive. And people get used to the rewards the get. Never take rewards away from them unless they did something very wrong. Let me give you an example of this. Assume you wrote some fighting game. In the first level you decide to help the player and whenever he destroys an enemy you restore some of his health. Now in level two you assume the player is more experienced and doesn’t need this anymore. So you decide to stop providing extra health.

Sound logical, but is definitely wrong. The player got used to getting extra health and now you take it away from him. He will not like it at all. (By the way, this also applies to female players I am using a male player as an example here because I do not want to write he/she or something like that all the time.) A better solution would be to increase the maximum health the player can have with each level, but also increase the damage the enemies inflict. You can now keep the extra health thing in there but, when you keep the amount of health you receive the same, its effect will get less in each next level. So in the end you achieve the same result but without taking a reward away.

When to give a reward
The moment you give a reward can also have a great influence on the effect it has on the player. Consider the following example. In a platform game, as an additional bonus, a player can collect rings. Now you could give the player an extra life whenever she collects 50 rings. Alternatively with each collected ring you can give her an extra life with a chance of one out of fifty. Some easy math shows you that the overall result is exactly the same.

But the effect on the player is considerably different. In the first case, at the beginning of the game the player will most likely not pay much attention to the rings. Only once she starts getting close to fifty, she will try to catch them all, also going for difficult ones. And once 50 is reached the attention for the rings declines again. So the rings cause excitement in peaks. In the second case there is constantly a chance to get an extra life so this adds some constant additional tension to the game. The player will constantly try to catch rings, but probably will never go for the difficult or time-consuming ones. The excitement causes by the rings is constant, but it is much lower than in the first case. What is better? Well, that depends on your game. If you want to avoid dull moments in the game you can go for the second option. But if you want to achieve peaks of excitement, go for the first option.

The player must understand the rewards
Of course (but often forgotten) the effects only happen if the player understands what is going on. When you need to collect 50 rings for a life you should probably display them as 12/50 when 12 rings have been collected, to make it clear 50 is a special number. In the second case it is harder to show so you should probably have some game character tell this to the player. And make is clear when it happens by using some sound effects and turning the ring into a 1UP sprite floating upwards. Remember: Game features will have little effect if the user does not knows they exist.

Conclusions
Design your rewards carefully. They have a huge influence on the pleasure of the player. Just throwing in some random points or health items is often doing your game more damage than good.