For me it just seems an example of you get what you watch. In case studies on business PKI (Performance Key Indicators) you usually noticed that people will optimize what’s measured. The same is seen with all kinds of reward systems (“you get what you pay for” – doesn’t really matter if it’s monetary or not).

As someone who uses “points” to generate behaviour from kids (in the scouts), I’ve always been surprised on how well this works.

I think this competitive drive is one of the reasons why people constantly strive to develop new games, sports, tests, etc. – to create new opportunities to become the best or first at something.

You even see it in blogging with people who get off on being the first to post a comment!

The online game industry knows a lot about this — they call people with a significant amount of this behavior an “Achiever”.

The theory, originated by Richard Bartle 16+ years ago, is that all players of online games fall into four types: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers.

There has been a lot of good academic work on this topic in recent years, though like a lot of good ideas has been overly popularlized and thus simplified too much.

How it applies to your thoughts is that a large percentage of the population (some say 50%+) have as their primary motivation to sustain a feeling of achievement. It can be lifting weights, doing the New York Sunday crossword puzzle, and of course, gaining experience and levels in an online game.

Not the entire population has this as their primary motivation, but when you add it to people who have it as a secondary motivation it is such a large population that the online games primarily cater to this Bartle type. In recent years as game designers we’ve been perfecting the our appeal to this type of player — knowing how long to wait before giving feedback that an achievement is in progress, how often someone needs a break so they don’t burn out, etc. A lot of it feels like Pavlovian research.

Thus more recently designed games like Worlds of Warcraft have learned from previous generations of game design to make an almost perfect game for the achiever dominant Bartle type. It isn’t just marketing or better graphics — they’ve really learned how to addict people to the feeling achievers get when they achieve.

However, not all the population is achievers, and there does appears to be some sexual dimorphism — there are still more women who are achiever dominant then other types, but a lower percentage then there is for men.

As I said, there is quite a bit of academic research on this topic in the last few years — people have been investigating if the Bartle types are real, if there are more then the 4 types, how much crossover is there between the types, and trying to figure out the observer biases caused by limiting the sample of people to those that are comfortable with computers or games.

The original paper is “Players who Suit MUDs” by Richard Bartle, if you search for others papers that refer to that paper you’ll find quite a few interesting ones.

It is disapointing to me that a lot of social science people automatically discount this type of research since it originated in the game industry, but I think its lessons apply to many different disciplines, ranging from industrial design (how to make a car that people care about keeping the MPG high), software engineering (how do keep people interested in the information we are delivering without burning out) to marketing and adversing.

But then a funny thing happened. Inevitably, they settled back to an average of 2 or 3, and that remained their average for the remainder of their time on Slashdot. Having learned how to win, they stepped back and started playing the game for fun.

I suspect this may be the case in lots of social software venues, but it may be that the ceiling on Slashdot created the effect, just as folks who beat a particular video game may go back to play it in a more exploratory way. Maybe in venues that are ranked rather than scored that competitiveness never dies off.

You can also learn about reward systems from casinos and psychology. If rewards are regular — say, a pellet of food if you push a button twice — then animals and people will perform that regular action to get the reward and move along. If you randomize the reward like a slot machine, people tend to keep doing that activity even if they’re rewarded — waiting for the next reward to come along. There’s reason to use regular rewards to hook a person initially (say, quickly leveling a character when starting an RPG) and random rewards to keep them coming back (say, collecting a set of magic armor that appears piece by piece, randomly).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/business/26leonextra.html?ex=1155096000&en=e92f7ee913dc9243&ei=5070

nevermind!