Concrete Rewards Provide Better Feedback

To ensure a player learns a game, it must provide a near-constant stream of feedback on the outcomes of their actions. This feedback consists of rewards and punishments they can directly link to their actions to fine-tune their heuristics going forward. Understanding how players respond to abstraction in rewards allows us to design better feedback systems.

There are different levels of abstraction in a game's resources. On the lowest, most concrete level are actual, discrete objects: coins, food, items, and so forth. Slightly more abstract but still somewhat concrete are things like stats, health, or time that have obvious value but are not tangible objects. And above that are truly abstract resources like positioning, threat, or liquidity that only exist as emergent properties of the heuristics that players develop to understand the game. In chess, concepts like control of the center or piece development are real assets to fight over, but they only exist as higher-level dynamics of a system that does not mention them at all.

To a player, especially a new one, concrete rewards provide more effective feedback than abstract rewards. For one thing, players cannot perceive rewards at a higher level of abstraction until they develop more complex heuristics for a game or genre. For another, it is easier to parse discrete objects than numbers or indicators.

One implication is that, especially for video games, the more you frame rewards as gaining concrete things instead of numbers, the better. Video games have a larger burden than board games for feedback because they must draw players' attention to the fact that something has happened, since they cannot rely on players to execute transactions.

Often, concrete reframing can be achieved through simple UI choices. In Minishoot' Adventures, experience is represented as tiny crystals collected from the ground. When obtained, they physically move to the upper corner of the screen where your experience gauge is. Instead of an abstract bar, the tiny gems pile up within the gauge like grains of sand in a tube. Health is also represented discretely, as hearts reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda.

Concrete rewards can also break down abstract target numbers into smaller, easier-to-conceptualize objectives. In Keyforge, your objective is to forge three keys, each requiring 6 aember. This establishes clear milestones that make success easier to envision than a system like Magic, which requires reducing your opponent's life total from 20 to 0 and could take many paths. It is easier to imagine what could happen with smaller numbers.

Because people find concrete objects more impactful than abstract values, you can sometimes trick them by converting the latter into the former. In Moon Colony Bloodbath, each building has a number showing how many people live in it. When the building is inevitably destroyed by robots, you gain a physical population token for each person inside. Although these tokens are less useful than the lost building, it still feels like compensation because you converted abstract value into concrete resources.

The nice thing about concrete rewards is that most of the time, they require nothing more than a change in framing. This makes them an easy and safe change to experiment with in any game.