7 Ways to Reward the Brain

Tom Chatfield’s TED talk comes down to one thing: engagement. All of his conclusions based on MMO games make perfect sense, and for the gaming companies they are also extremely important. They have to continue to engage their players so that the players continue to pay the monthly fees or buy in game items.

While all of Chatfield’s conclusions make sense, I’m not sure about his numbers. Chatfield said that they determined the ideal drop rate for items needed to be about 25%. My main experience with MMOs is with World of Warcraft (WoW). I played it for about six years. In WoW, a 25% drop rate would be considered pretty low. In fact, anything with less than a 75% drop rate, I’d consider low, especially if I had to collect 15 of them. Those would be the quests I would skip (back when one could still choose which quests to complete).

My experience with WoW does bear out Chatfield’s stressing the importance of having multiple goals that the player can choose which ones to complete. WoW always had these until the newest expansion, Cataclysm, was released. The new quest design gave out a couple quests at a time that all had to be completed before new quests could be accepted. I was forced to do quests I didn’t want to do. This was the main reason I recently cancelled my accounts.

What does this mean for designing games for learning? The whole idea of games being engaging because they hit the right balance between not too easy and not too hard is just like Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The difficulty of whatever is being taught through the game ought to be variable in order to accommodate learners of different level s of expertise. Chatfield also talked about a window of enhanced engagement when learners are more likely to remember what is learned. I imagine these would come at the end of a level. When we would raid on WoW, we wouldn’t have to pay much attention during the trash leading up to the boss, but the boss fights took a much greater level of engagement in order to succeed. So in designing a game, the core skill, knowledge, or idea ought to be integral to the larger boss fights.