Rewards

What this element is

Rewards are how players are incentivised to perform certain actions within the game — points, progress, sounds, badges, story advancement, or the quiet satisfaction of getting something right. Fail states are rewards' shadow: what the game lets you lose, and what losing costs you.

Why it carries values

Design decisions around points, progress and failure all send signals about what matters. Rewards can promote accuracy, compliance, security or curiosity — and the wrong performance measures produce unintended, sometimes harmful consequences. In serious games the stakes are higher than in entertainment: a scoreboard that spices up a quiz can shame a struggling child in a clinic.

Patterns from practice

Visible scoring

Medical VR training games use straightforward scoring: points appear when the trainee gets something right, and an end-of-scenario summary lays out successes, failures and missed interventions. The values here are correctness, efficiency and completeness of clinical procedure. Physiotherapy mini-games use simple points to signal progress — and players sometimes build their own goals on top ("collect every item, or do the entire thing backwards"), turning an externally imposed reward into self-directed play.

Intrinsic rewards

Several designers deliberately moved away from overt scoring where complex or affective learning was at stake. The reef conservation game never states its objective; instead incentives are arranged so that building a thriving ecosystem is the reward, and players learn about threats to the reef by overcoming them. The space exploration game rejects points entirely — story progression is the reward. A workshop facilitator located the reward in comfort and social bonding itself.

Compliance rewards

The learner-driver game rewards rule-following with early completion and pleasant sounds; there are "absolutely no rewards for breaking the rules or experimenting." In classrooms, though, competition crept in anyway — teenage boys turned compliance into a race, adding a second value system (winning, comparison, speed) running parallel to the intended one. Reward systems are porous to social context.

No fail state

Games for a disability service deliberately avoid fail states: care and encouragement outrank competition. Clinical assessment games go further — any visible feedback would corrupt the measurement and could harm the child's self-esteem, so scores exist but are reserved for clinicians. And the youth social services game refuses right/wrong framing altogether: "your responses are never right or wrong, they have implications."

The absence of a fail state can also be a warning sign. The fire warden game's designer wanted a meaningful fail — the building burns down — but institutional priorities favoured completion and coverage. Without a loss state, learners can zone out, get lucky, and bumble through: the gap between true competence and low-resistance compliance.

Questions to ask your team

1. What does our reward system actually reward — understanding, or completion?
2. Who sees the scores? Could visible performance data shame, stress or unfairly compare players?
3. Is failure allowed? What does our fail-state policy (harsh, gentle, absent) teach?
4. If a compulsory audience plays this in a group, what social dynamics (competition, trolling) will our rewards create?
5. Could a player "win" without learning anything? Would we know?
6. Are we rewarding compliance because it serves the learner — or because it is easy to audit?