200 Word RPG Challenge

I am going to try to enter the 200 Word RPG Challenge (see here).

While looking at some of the judges, I found some interesting links from some far more experienced designers.

One was to a discussion on a psychology study put together by economists and finance people at MIT.  They were studying merit based pay rewards for work, and discovered that counter-intuitive to conventional belief, these often don't work.  The found (in brief) that for boring, basic, low-skill physical tasks, higher cash (an extrinsic reward) mitigated the low intrinsic-reward for the task.  However, for even rudimentary higher engagement, higher skill, higher thought tasks, merit pay systems actually degraded task performance.  See the studies HERE and HERE.  Also, HERE is an interesting video about it.  One curious study tested merit pay for giving blood, and found that in some cases, the higher cash reward degraded the interest in giving blood, but the choice of cash contributions to a charity by the blood bank increased the interest because a) the cash was either insufficient for the intrinsic unpleasantness of blood-loss, or b) too much to make the unpleasantness intrinsically valued. But giving to someone else in a more concrete way appealed to altruism which provided an intrinsic reward.

This study also suggests applications in game design.  Still chewing on that...