More About Rewards

Rewards are important
A careful design of rewards is crucial to make a game fun to play. Other pages described The Effect of Rewards and the use of Highscore Lists. Here we will discuss some further aspects.

Features as rewards
One class of rewards that are very effective when properly applied are rewards in the form of additional features in the game. Such rewards can improve and extend the game play and, hence, provide a strong motivation for people to try to achieve them. But make sure the players know that the rewards exist. If they don’t know, they will not try to achieve them.

Typical examples of this are new cars or new tracks in race games that you unlock by achieving certain times or places. They can be primarly cosmetic (like a new paint job) or really change your abilities as a player (like a faster car). Additional tracks or levels are definitely something players enjoy but sometimes they are just used to mask that the game has not enough content. If you only create four tracks in your game and make them all immediately available the player will soon have seen them all and might stop playing. If he has to finish first in the first track to unlock the second, etc. it will take him a lot longer to reach all tracks and, hence, extends the playing time. However, the reverse can also be true. If the player fails to win the first track time and again, he will soon loose interest and actually stop playing the game. So make sure that you give enough variation already at the start and that such rewards are achievable by all players.

Smaller rewards
Extra game features are nice but they are often rather big rewards. You either get them or not and, if a player just fails this can lead to a big frustration. Sometimes that is exactly what you want as a designer. If you do not want this all-or-nothing mechanism you can give the player points, or credits, or money as a reward and then let him use this money to obtain the game features he wants. This is often a very nice mechanism as it adds an element of choice for the player and games tend to get more interesting when the player has more choices. For example, in many tennis games (and other sports games) the player can buy better rackets or shoes. And in many RPG games you can buy weapons or potions.

The risk
There is one big risk when using additional game features as rewards. These features make it often easier to play the game. For example you are given extra, stronger weapons. In this way you make the game easier for the good players, which is actually exactly the wrong thing. Good players need more difficult challenges so you should make the game harder for good players, not easier. And you should help the players that are less good. This can be achieved by combining rewards with additional challenges. For example, when you give a special weapon also other enemies appear (but you also get more points to defeat them so there is still a motivation for getting the reward).

Taking rewards away from the player
Many games take the additional features away when the player dies or his ship or car is destroyed. This is something to be very careful with cause it easily leads to a chain-reaction. Take for example a standard (scrolling) space shooter. Often you start with a simple weapon but while you survive longer you get better weapons and shields, either by destroying enough enemies or by picking up bonus objects. And you need these to continue to survive. But once you are destroyed the first time, you loose the additional features. As all the strong enemies are still there, with your weak weapons you have no chance to survive, so you die very quickly again. And this happens also with your remaining ships. So after the first time your ship is destroyed, the game is basically over. So be careful with taking features away when you die.

There are many ways to solve this. The game Return to Sector 9 for example solves the problem by making any bonus feature last only a limited amount of time. They simply increase the number of bonusses to pick up when the levels get more complicated. Another option is the let the player start at the beginning of the level again when he dies. You can also let the player collect bonus items but give him the opportunity to use them or not. Unused items will remain available when he dies or the ship is destroyed (New Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo DS uses this). Or you can of course let him keep the features or only take the last one away. But this required that you have enough different ones to give the player the constant possibility to improve and, hence, to keep it interesting to get the bonus items. (This is where New Super Mario Bros fails.)