As an explorer, I’m pretty happy. But it took me a while to realize that there were so many things see. The icons lead you to think “this is all there is to do” instead of “this is a good sample of things to do.”

Without going too deep into psychology, it is also known that extrinsic motivations (ie. rewards, achievements, badges, etc) tend to overwhelm intrinsic motivations. So any game that is light on the external rewards is going to be more favourable to a community who can focus on the things they do just for fun, or because they get something else out of them (I dunno, personal growth, or the chance to make friends, or something).

One of the practical issues with focussing on ‘better’ objectives (and I’m sure you know this) is that sometimes the objectives you’d like to reward are difficult to measure. Or difficult to measure fairly/objectively/ etc. So it’s simpler to hand out objectives that might not be ideal but are easily measurable.

So in WoW, ‘play well with others’ or ‘be a good raid leader’ is pretty hard to monitor and measure automatically, whereas ‘turn up to battlegrounds and earn honor points’ is easy for the game to monitor. Also they don’t want to punish poor behaviours too badly because it’s not supposed to be as effective as rewarding good ones.

I wonder if this is partly why sandboxes have extremely creative and immersed communities. I’m not saying a game like WoW doesn’t, but it’s very different. In WoW, everything is figured out because all the goals are made very obvious and there’s no way to really deviate from them. The devs have made the goals the only way to play. Then you’ve got Terraria or Minecraft or Mount & Blade. The players create all the content, which is to say all the goals which takes a very long time to get stale and boring, but also requires a lot more energy than raiding in an MMO. I don’t know. I’m kind of rambling on the idea here.

But I suppose the ideas that went off in my head related to outcomes based games and the drive toward efficiency, while sandbox based games (the opposite of outcomes) drive toward creativity. I wonder what the real correlation is here.

I guess you could also make the argument that the outcome based people are the ones who yell “I’m bored!” when they race through an MMO to the level cap.

WoW is replete with examples of outcomes that incentivise lousy behaviour. For example, the “kill Balinda and lose fast” attitude in Alterac Valley came about because the outcome (Honor Points farmed) was more easily achieved with a quick loss for your team than a hard-won victory.

Also, it’s Bartle, damnit. “Bartlett” was the US President in The West Wing

Just it’s not an actual optimal way for all players to play. And definitely not the most fun for everyone. I think because the UI supports listing achievements with points next to them, it implies that the devs back that interpretation.

Part of the reason I think this is fascinating is because I can see how it relates to real world problems such as the one I described. So if game designers can figure out how to motivate players to explore the game and have fun in a way that doesn’t prioritise achievers, but involves having fun AND getting to the desired outcome it might be something we could also apply elsewhere.