So, Pokemon Go and rewards
This article might ruin your perception of rewards in games. Read at your own risk.
Pokemon Go is a very smartly designed game.
Part of that design is the rewarding scheme. Every action you do is rewarded by at least two different kinds of rewards. For example catching a pokemon gives you the pokemon(obviously), candy for that pokemon and experience.
It goes even deeper. Some of the actions have an explicit (obvious) and implicit (not so obvious) reward. For example curveballs. When you throw a curveball you get bonus experience (explicit) and a higher catch rate (implicit).
Every single action can be shown giving at least two rewards to the player.
That is very smart in multiple layers. The first layer is that even doing something you might not want to do, is at least partly giving you rewards that you want. (For example catching a Rattata)
Second layer is that when you are doing something for one reward, you are still subconsciously aware that you are getting something more, even if you are not too keen on the specific thing and you wouldn't do the action for it. (again, Rattata candy)
Thirdly because of this, you feel like you are always getting more than your action is worth so you are getting more out of your buck.
But let's stop there for a second. How do you know you are getting more than your action is worth? Because you are getting multiple rewards, which means multiple times the value (let's go with three). But how do you know how much of a certain reward the action would be worth if you only get one of them? Would you get the same amount, but just of one of the rewards?
Let's make an example. Right now for a first evolution Rattata that you release afterwards, you are getting 4 Rattata candy, 100 XP and 100 dust. If you were to only obtain dust, your brain defaults to only receiving 100 dust, which is a third of the total reward now, so the current system is more worth!
But would you?
Maybe you'd receive 300 dust as a compensation for losing the other two rewards, and after all that would make it a balanced trade.
But hold on a minute. What if the worth of the catching action is even more? What if catching is actually worth 500 dust?
By splitting the rewards (and not ever showing us the "full" worth) they would be able to lower the rewards and at the same time make us feel like we are getting more for our buck. Even worse, there are legitimately times when we are straight up not interested in one of the rewards (like experience when you are fully leveled up), so you are writing that one as a total loss.
This would mean that instead of getting a "full"reward, we are actually getting 3/5ths of a reward normally.
Now this is a pure speculation. Surely they wouldn't take so many things out of our experience like that. Right?
Okay.
Let's go step further.
There are regular "free" events during which one of the rewards given is tripled. So nice of them.
So if the current bonus is experience, we are still getting 4 Rattata candies (1/5th of worth), 300 XP (3/5ths of worth) and 100 dust (1/5th of worth). This comes out to 5/5th worth which means full worth.
In other words, during the "bonus" event, we are getting the full worth, it costs the creators nothing, we feel even better about the rewards and how we are getting so much more worth...but are we?
(Note: this is how I actually came to the amount of 500 dust being the baseline)
Of course during those events you can spend resources to get even more, but at that point, you are spending something to get something more and at this rare occasion you are actually really getting more value out of your buck.
I am not just speculating this. This approach of splitting rewards to lower the amount is popular across the board. Think of all the games where you are getting rank and some "freebies" along with it. Or the games where you do a tough dungeon/raid/whatever to get a drop you waited for for ages and at the same time you were getting materials for crafting later, but you are just a smidgen away from. Did you feel like you are getting less than what you are supposed to, or did you feel that warm feeling in your heart for time well spent because after all, you got more stuff?
And don't think about this the wrong way. I don't fault games for doing this, after all long gone are the times where we'd play the games just for completion's sake. The rewards, even if part of the experience, are important to keep us hooked, to keep us thinking we are getting rewarded for doing the things. Because if a game doesn't give us that, we are gonna go play a game that does.
In conclusion: from a design standpoint I like this system. A player feels good while doing normal tasks, everything is giving you value, at the cost of getting a bit less than the default worth is actually. At the same time, it's slowing down the grind of the players and keeping the game alive for longer.
But as a player thinking about these things, I sometimes feel cheated. Don't you?
Pokemon Go is a very smartly designed game.
Part of that design is the rewarding scheme. Every action you do is rewarded by at least two different kinds of rewards. For example catching a pokemon gives you the pokemon(obviously), candy for that pokemon and experience.
It goes even deeper. Some of the actions have an explicit (obvious) and implicit (not so obvious) reward. For example curveballs. When you throw a curveball you get bonus experience (explicit) and a higher catch rate (implicit).
Every single action can be shown giving at least two rewards to the player.
That is very smart in multiple layers. The first layer is that even doing something you might not want to do, is at least partly giving you rewards that you want. (For example catching a Rattata)
Second layer is that when you are doing something for one reward, you are still subconsciously aware that you are getting something more, even if you are not too keen on the specific thing and you wouldn't do the action for it. (again, Rattata candy)
Thirdly because of this, you feel like you are always getting more than your action is worth so you are getting more out of your buck.
But let's stop there for a second. How do you know you are getting more than your action is worth? Because you are getting multiple rewards, which means multiple times the value (let's go with three). But how do you know how much of a certain reward the action would be worth if you only get one of them? Would you get the same amount, but just of one of the rewards?
Let's make an example. Right now for a first evolution Rattata that you release afterwards, you are getting 4 Rattata candy, 100 XP and 100 dust. If you were to only obtain dust, your brain defaults to only receiving 100 dust, which is a third of the total reward now, so the current system is more worth!
But would you?
Maybe you'd receive 300 dust as a compensation for losing the other two rewards, and after all that would make it a balanced trade.
But hold on a minute. What if the worth of the catching action is even more? What if catching is actually worth 500 dust?
By splitting the rewards (and not ever showing us the "full" worth) they would be able to lower the rewards and at the same time make us feel like we are getting more for our buck. Even worse, there are legitimately times when we are straight up not interested in one of the rewards (like experience when you are fully leveled up), so you are writing that one as a total loss.
This would mean that instead of getting a "full"reward, we are actually getting 3/5ths of a reward normally.
 |
| Look at this smug face, only giving you 3/5ths of what he is worth. |
Now this is a pure speculation. Surely they wouldn't take so many things out of our experience like that. Right?
Okay.
Let's go step further.
There are regular "free" events during which one of the rewards given is tripled. So nice of them.
So if the current bonus is experience, we are still getting 4 Rattata candies (1/5th of worth), 300 XP (3/5ths of worth) and 100 dust (1/5th of worth). This comes out to 5/5th worth which means full worth.
In other words, during the "bonus" event, we are getting the full worth, it costs the creators nothing, we feel even better about the rewards and how we are getting so much more worth...but are we?
(Note: this is how I actually came to the amount of 500 dust being the baseline)
Of course during those events you can spend resources to get even more, but at that point, you are spending something to get something more and at this rare occasion you are actually really getting more value out of your buck.
I am not just speculating this. This approach of splitting rewards to lower the amount is popular across the board. Think of all the games where you are getting rank and some "freebies" along with it. Or the games where you do a tough dungeon/raid/whatever to get a drop you waited for for ages and at the same time you were getting materials for crafting later, but you are just a smidgen away from. Did you feel like you are getting less than what you are supposed to, or did you feel that warm feeling in your heart for time well spent because after all, you got more stuff?
And don't think about this the wrong way. I don't fault games for doing this, after all long gone are the times where we'd play the games just for completion's sake. The rewards, even if part of the experience, are important to keep us hooked, to keep us thinking we are getting rewarded for doing the things. Because if a game doesn't give us that, we are gonna go play a game that does.
In conclusion: from a design standpoint I like this system. A player feels good while doing normal tasks, everything is giving you value, at the cost of getting a bit less than the default worth is actually. At the same time, it's slowing down the grind of the players and keeping the game alive for longer.
But as a player thinking about these things, I sometimes feel cheated. Don't you?
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