Reward structures in games, and which ones a course can use

SLOP3733 · Week 1

130 hours is one course

It is also one ranked season, or most of a Souls game.

Nobody plans the hundred and thirty hours they put into a game. Nobody grits their teeth through them. You queue again, and they go by.

The same hours in a course are miserable, and most people cannot do them at all without a deadline standing over them.

Same hours. Same person. Often the same week.

So the difference is not you

What differs is how fast the activity pays you back.

That is a property of how the thing is built, not a fact about your character.

Which is the only good news in this lecture, because a property of how something is built can be changed.

Why “gamify your studies” does not work

Points stapled to the outside of work that has not changed.

You still sit down to the same undifferentiated three hours. There is now a streak counter judging you afterwards.

The reward is about the work rather than inside it. A game does not reward you for having played — it rewards you while you play, continuously, on rules you could recite.

Six things a game can pay you with

Four of them die on contact with your situation

Score needs an instant impartial judge. Most study has none.

Collection needs somebody else to have authored the list. Write it yourself and you will write one you can finish.

Streaks work by threat. A mechanism that punishes you for a bad week gets abandoned in the first bad week — which is the week you needed it.

Execution mastery needs you to already love the subject enough to do unrewarded work. That is the trap this course exists to avoid.

Two survive: the ranked ladder, and the boss gate

That is the rest of the semester, in that order

What each of the two is for

The ranked ladder — weeks 2 to 5. Many short contests, a rating that survives between them. It buys you the inside of thirty minutes.

The boss gate — weeks 6 to 9. Progress as a sequence of things that can each be beaten. It buys you a way into something too hard to start.

Weeks 10 to 12 are you running both at once on a real subject.

Three systems I built on myself, and all three failed

Each one measured what went in

A timer measures how long you sat there.

All three measured the input. That is the comfortable half, and it is the half that cannot tell you whether the semester is going well.

Before next week

Work out the feedback loop in one course you are taking right now.

How many hours of your own work pass between doing something and finding out whether it was any good?

Bring the number in hours. Most people’s first honest answer is somewhere between forty and the whole semester.