Quick thought on Rewards in games

I recently read a blog post about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. I’ve come across and heard a lot of talk following a similar thought pattern to this blog post, the common theme being that extrinsic rewards can be counter productive with a suggestion that we could learn from video games intrinsic reward system.

But increasingly video games have both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. How many hours did you spend trying to get the gnome to the end of left 4 dead 2 so you could wear your virtual Depeche Mode tshirt on xbox live. How many of us put our gamerscore or trophies on our forum post? Games are getting increasingly tied into the social networks that surround content delivery systems and as a result many video game rewards are not impacting on the game itself but give a little something extra to show off in these networks.