For Christs' sake, I just earned achievements and 51,000 points while watching a movie trailer!

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/556018/scott_pilgrim_vs_the_world_goes_retro_in_new_interactive_trailer.html

At work we recently started using a Stackoverflow clone internally. That means I can now earn points by asking and answering technical questions for my coworkers.

I've been playing games on steam for ages, and achievements are always a great way to improved playability.

For example I would play through Half-Life 2 once, for the story. Then play through it again to listen to all the developer commentary, then again to get all the achievements.

I think the best example of a rewards system I have seen in games is Goldeneye 007 way back on the N64. It featured cheats that were either amusing (Paintball mode, Donkey Kong mode etc) or the standard run of the mill invincibility and all weapons.

To unlock all of the cheats you had to beat a speedrun time on each level, and you had to beat the game on the highest difficultly level to even be able to access every one of the speedruns. Even though completing the speedruns in of itself was rewarding (Due to their sometimes insane difficulty) the unlocked cheats allowed for countless variations on playing the single player and multiplayer modes, adding a huge amount of replay value to the game. Notably the very last unlockable, 007 mode allowed you to tinker with health and weapon damage settings.

For me the rewards system was amazingly compelling - enough for me to unlock everything a second time even after my save game was deleted!

"At work we recently started using a Stackoverflow clone internally. That means I can now earn points by asking and answering technical questions for my coworkers."

That's sounds really great I have to say. So does everyone feel inclined to use it or do some not care much for this levelling stuff?

Something that I started using that was recently released is EpicWin on the iPhone. It really does work to motivate me to do some chores, but also just working out or doing good deeds. I'm using it now instead of my calendar as a todo list.

EpicWin's a great example, Juha.

There are many people for whom the idea of an achievements or badge system doesn't appeal. I can certainly understand that - some systems seem like cheesy motivation for kids. Personally, I'm a fan of well designed systems that don't exist for their own sake or simply to take your cash. If they are designed specifically to motivate the behaviour they want to engender (e.g. more engagement in a community space forums, more people voting and ranking member's content etc.) then I think they have the potential to be great.

I think they have their place because they can potentially motivate people who hang on the fringe of a community, watching without engaging, to finally click on the "rate this game" link for the simple fact that they get a star/badge on their profile and they can feel a greater sense of "ownership" for being acknowledged as an active community member.

It's all a matter of taste in the end, but if you're not into badges/achievements would you consider helping us create a good system that works for the PlayMaker site? :).

Picking up this thread again...

From looking at the source I gathered that the site uses Drupal. Surely there are some simple plugins that can add badges and such, so it shouldn't be super-hard to do.

Something to consider however is that new users might be intimidated by other people having loads of badges and "exp". It's a bit like having post count, which I know a lot of forums remove just because it doesn't really do anything constructive.

I'm not sure how to tone down the significance of the system. Maybe you just unlock stuff on the user side, maybe you get access to some new features and you can get an e-mail account at the site and such.

Hi Juha, welcome to Playmaker! Hope to be able to meet you in November.

Yep, this is a Drupal site. We've got a badge framework in the site that we've used occasionally, the question is not so much 'Can we have a rewards system?' so much as 'What do we want in a rewards system?'

Personally I'm skeptical of the value of reward systems, particularly in the case of Playmaker. I think contributions to the site should be made primarily for their own sake (like Wikipedia) rather than to gain profile bling.

That said, I'm more than willing to listen to suggestions.

@earok: Definitely be nice to get some input on that - I think to say that the purpose of a reward system is to provide "profile bling" is a little uncharitable to those of us who regard it more as a personal record. Calling an achievement badge like "Art Challenge Gold Winner" "profile bling" is like comparing the Medal of Honor to Snoop Dogg's gold chain hahaha (how's that for an extreme comparison ;).

Haha, that's fair enough, I was being fatuous there.

But I think the Art Challenge is an example of where our (limited) reward system isn't quite working, we had a fairly good turn-out for the first art challenge but not so much for the second, despite (or because of?) the offer of badges rewarded on the basis of votes by the Playmaker community.

Personally I think it's pretty safe to say that the engagement in the art challenge (or anything else at the moment) doesn't relate to any awards system or lack thereof? I'd personally like to see one implemented alongside more tangible community building initiatives. Anyone got any ideas? lol xD We have a few initiatives ready to go that have simply required the time and energy many of us lack being full time workers with demanding hobbies... like game development ;) However, we're looking at being able to turn this around over the next month or so, if things go well!

Thank you Erik.

I agree on the "profile bling" thing, that's why I mentioned giving the users "stuff" that only he/she can see or use. So it becomes more of a personal thing and not a race.

But yeah, if contributions can be made out of pure goodwill, that is better in the long run I think. Perhaps something just needs to be done about how to contribute.

@Damien Dwelling on it further, I think maybe I agree with you now about the rewards system not having much of a tangible effect on the art challenge, but the fact that they're competitions at all and not just something 'done for fun' may be having a detrimental effect on the amount of work submitted.. Personally I was put off entering anything in part because nothing I could do artistically would be 'competition worthy'.

Although admittedly they've got a vastly larger community, Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday produces some incredible stuff (See Wrong End Bosses) with no competition or reward system. Is it in the spirit of Playmaker that we foster good-spirited collaboration over competition?

That said, I do have an idea for a game mechanic on the site that I feel may encourage a positive result. Simply putting a Leaderboard on the games page with the user accounts that have voted on the most games, in order to encourage people to rate NZ games (and better yet, to actually play them). I've already programmed it behind the scenes and it's ready to go.