Why money isn’t everything

If anybody ever found the “indie movement” to come out of nowhere and wondered why would someone leave a major company to work on a small game of their own, please just watch this little video. To everyone else, watch it either way, it’s a very interesting subject on it’s own and the video is littered with research material worth hearing about.

Plus, it’s just fun to watch. Ooooohhhh, pretty drawings!

Summing the whole thing up: money, purpose, mastery and autonomy are the factors that drive us to work. What a coincidence that two of those, mastery and autonomy, are so prominent in every single game! Though this research does get me thinking on one thing in particular:

Say, if you were to equal getting paid in real life with leveling up in an RPG …. doesn’t that mean that the whole leveling scheme of RPGs works best when the task at hand (battle) is only mechanical and doesn’t require any cognitive thinking? The same goes for achievements and the like. They’re external rewards designed to incentivize a (more often than not) mechanical and mindless task.

Though I don’t know if this holds any water since I’m comparing two very different reward schemes, one being vital to, you know, live and the other being an ethereal reward with little to no actual impact on your real life.

Still, we don’t see this line of thinking or even subject very often in the blogosphere.