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As a kid I once I had an unusual boyscout camp experience that, in retrospect, seems almost like a game design parable.

After we’d set up our tents in the woods, the camp leaders revealed to us a steel box. Inside was a large pile of rusty old keys painted in different colors. These keys would be awarded for different achievements.

The camp leaders didn’t say what the keys were ultimately for, nor was the meaning of the colors explained. They only said they’d monitor which group of scouts had the most of them at any time. Then they locked the box and took it away.

And with that, they had us by the balls.

Keys were given for simple tasks at first, like solving a riddle. But as our desire for the mysterious tokens grew we found ourselves doing increasingly stupid things to get them. Chores we would normally hate were now competed for, so long as they could earn you keys. It’s pretty easy to get caught up in these things as a kid. MUST. HAVE. KEYS.

Meanwhile, the camp leaders sat lazily in their luxurious bungalow tent drinking vodka… Yes, they were officially evil.

We began speculating over the meaning of the colors. For a while, everyone assumed the red keys were worth much more than the others, and some red keys were traded for multiple other ones, but it turned out to be only a rumor.

Groups were pre-assigned, and I was in a group with the two camp bullies. Another kid had already fled their group in tears, so I was not thrilled to be his replacement. But strangely, we got along fine. When you’re focused on the prize (even when nobody knows what it is!) it can turn enemies into allies. We accumulated more and more keys, which we carefully hid in a secret place so no one could steal them. We became a great team.

The biggest bully was pretty high-status for the fact that he punched other kids a lot and, well, he had a deck of cards with pictures of naked women on them. You just don’t mess with anyone with access to full graphic nudity, even if at that age you have no clue what should be interesting about it. Anyway, he traded his precious deck of cards for a bunch of keys from the other tent. I admired his sacrifice.

This was all very exciting for a few days, until we began to have doubts regarding the importance of the keys as well as our supposed ultimate reward for all this effort. The camp leaders had started giving out regular unpainted keys in larger quantities for increasingly ridiculous things. They weren’t exactly going, “dance for me monkey! Alright here have a key”, but… actually, that’s exactly what they did. Again: evil.

Power corrupts, as they say, but the keys lost their magic. We still kept collecting them — they had turned into an weird kind of status symbol and we weren’t just going to give that up, or maybe we had just developed some kind of pavlovian reaction to them — but we collected them with less passion than before.

In the end, my group had the biggest collection of keys. On the final day, the camp leaders traded our whole pile against one key that opened a small box. The whole week had built up to this moment. We opened the box, and inside was … a pack of cookies.

A PACK OF COOKIES? Oh come on.

What’s worse is that the camp leaders forced us to share them with the other groups. For the next fifteen minutes, we were devastated. We’d gone through all this trouble for nothing.

Although… the whole week was kind of fun.

Now here’s my South Park ending (’I think we all learned something today!’):

Show the cool stuff, then take it away
Getting a glimpse of the box of keys was enough to get the whole snowball rolling. This reminds me of shooters where you get the coolest gun in the first level, but then you lose it and you have to work to get it back.

Virtual currency and competition breed emergent social behaviors
This is a no-brainer. We traded keys, we secured them in hiding places, we created rumors, enemies joined together as allies, keys became status symbols.

Initial rewards easy, later rewards hard
‘Solve a riddle, get a key.’ Nice. From the moment you do this, you’ve become committed to the game, and the next challenge can be a bit harder, gradually ramping up further after that.

Don’t let your reward currency inflate
This is where the camp leaders clearly dropped the ball. Instead of keeping the keys scarce and keeping the difficulty curve of the challenges going, they started giving more keys for less effort. The later rewards (uncolored keys) were also lamer than the initial rewards (colored keys), visually reinforcing our perception that the keys were worth less than we thought.

Players don’t need to know the ultimate reward
You will just assume that certain things, like the keys, have major significance. Why else have them in the game? They’ll probably be useful later.

But don’t screw them in the end…
What the f—! You feel betrayed when your effort is not rewarded in the end. The pack of cookies stands for every game that had a rushed ending or did not deliver an otherwise satisfying conclusion. What if The Secret of Monkey Island had no proper ending but skipped to the words “Turn off your computer and go to sleep?”. Actually, some games do this. This is just an offhand example, but Rome: Total War’s campaign ends with the line “Congratulations, you completed the game! [OK]“. Not cool.

Kids are gullible
Seriously, what were we thinking?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Game Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.