Social Rewards and Other Big Ideas Behind the RPM Method

The RPM design method draws from numerous fields to help designers generate satisfying social experiences and foster digital thriving. 

What is RPM?

RPM is a design method for generating social satisfaction in multiplayer games. The RPM method was specifically developed to help bridge the gap between system design (the job of most game designers) and social design (which is new to many). 

The core strategy of RPM (short for Requirements, Partners, and Moments) is to make players feel good about themselves and attribute that feeling to other people. In doing so, system designers build upon what they know to create more satisfying social experiences. 

RPM uses concepts from a range of fields (psychology, sociology, coaching science, etc), which we will briefly describe below. For details on the method itself and how to use it, see RPM Method for Social Satisfaction.

Social rewards

Social rewards are the outcomes of positive social interactions. This is important to RPM because social rewards are what make social games satisfying. 

Essentially more social rewards = more social satisfaction. Stronger social rewards can make those that occur even more impactful. To increase the strength of social rewards, you should consider the following:

• Closer partners = stronger social rewards
• Prosocial acts produce social rewards 
• More prosocial acts = more social rewards
• Selfish + prosocial motives = stronger social rewards

How many social rewards are required for a game to be socially satisfying? As a handy measure, about 5:1 compared to negative experiences. It takes about five good social experiences to overcome a single bad one. You’ll likely want to strive for many more social rewards, but 5:1 is easy to remember. 

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Intrinsic motivation is being motivated to engage in a behavior for the pleasure of the activity, when the reward is the activity itself. Extrinsic motivation is being motivated to earn a reward or avoid punishment.

RPM can leverage intrinsic motivation to produce social rewards, and in doing so avoid the need to encourage positive behavior through extrinsic game rewards, which can be costly to produce and potentially hurt a company’s bottom line.

Salience

Salience effect refers to the tendency of people to pay attention to what’s most prominent. Our minds simply prioritize things that are more prominent or emotionally charged. 

By focusing on meaningful and obvious moments, RPM creates opportunities for designers to use the salience effect to increase social engagement and satisfaction.

Utility before unity

Utility before unity is a simple principle that explains why people seek, join, and stay with groups. People initially use groups to fulfill personal needs, and they will stay when the benefits exceed the needs, often through attachment to members of the group.

By bringing people together to achieve both personal and common goals, RPM sets the stage for longer term connections, which lead to more sustained and satisfying groups. 

Attribution (and misattribution)

Attributions are explanations people give for why they were successful or why they failed. By helping people attribute personal success in some way to others, RPM encourages the idea that working with other players is a good thing.

Attribution doesn’t require someone to purposely act in ways that benefit others. Sometimes, in games specifically, “collateral” benefits can be created indirectly or even unintentionally.

Other players sometimes get credit for contributing to a success without doing anything. This is called misattribution, and for the purposes of social satisfaction is an acceptable, if not desirable, outcome. The following is a simple formula for misattribution: 

Multiple people + close proximity + arousing activity = misattribution (more or less)

“Arousing activity” refers to behaviors that produce endorphins, which can range from video games to exercise. Basically, if you get people who are doing something that gets their endorphins going and you bring them close enough together, they’re likely to associate their good feelings with each other.

Trust

All social activities require at least a minimum level of trust. Without trust, people simply won’t engage. This can be detrimental to team games and other online social experiences. 

Let’s dive a little deeper. 

Online team games are high-trust situations. Most players in these games are strangers, which means they are low-trust. Putting low-trust strangers into high-trust situations can often lead to social conflict — we really shouldn’t be surprised when our games have disruptive behavior!  

By making social presence and interaction personally meaningful, RPM helps increase stranger-to-stranger trust in low-trust game situations and proactively reduce disruptive behavior.

Socialization and social learning theory

Socialization is the process by which people learn the values and rules of a group through social interaction. RPM can help identify subtle ways to introduce and reinforce healthy ways of interacting, making positive social values the norm and a regular part of the game.

Social learning theory says that people learn through reinforcements for behaviors that bring us success. If through RPM generated designs players learn that success means playing well with others, then everyone wins!

Positive externalities

Positive externalities are when the actions of one party indirectly or unintentionally benefit another. These occur when there is a positive gain personally and socially. 

RPM provides game designers with a framework for finding opportunities for positive externalities that might be otherwise missed.

Sportsmanship, cooperation, belonging, and in-group bias

Sportsmanship is showing respect for the game and everyone involved — with or without the objective of mastery. This includes doing your best, encouraging others, and accepting the rulings of officials. 

When personal achievement outweighs teamwork, you get bad sportsmanship and disruptive behavior, such as cheating. When increasing your competitive rank is your primary goal, your teammates are risks to your personal success. Furthermore, competitive pressure can diminish intrinsic motivation, along with tangible rewards, threats, deadlines, and more.

Clearly, if we want to see healthy behavior in a multiplayer team game, superiority through competition and comparison can not be the only reward. In addition to increasing social rewards, designers can use the RPM method to identify ways to foster cooperation and a sense of belonging as well as in-group bias. Cooperation can help improve performance while reducing performance pressure — making success more likely. By seeing their teammates as “in-group,” they’re more likely to cooperate, which will improve performance still.

Independence and interdependence

The concepts of independence and interdependence are important to RPM because the method in many ways strives to connect them. 

Many (if not most) game systems are designed to reward players for independent actions and achieving their personal goals. In team games, however, this can conflict with the need for teammates to work well together towards their shared goal of winning. Too much autonomy leads to poor teamwork, little connection, and decreased social stickiness. Too much interdependence can create overdependence, resentment, and a lack of growth — also decreasing social stickiness. 

Designers can use the RPM method to work toward a balance between independence and interdependence in order to create more personally and socially satisfying moments that keep players coming back. 

Root causes of conflict

According to the book Prosocial (Atkins et al, 2019) “…we tend to attribute bad behavior in others to personal intent, when in fact it is often due to situational constraints.” As designers, we literally define game situations and their constraints. 

By focusing on what makes players feel good about themselves, RPM provides a structure for analyzing how situational constraints may be contributing to undesirable social behavior, which gives us a path toward fixing them.

Now what?

If you’re interested in learning more about RPM, we recommend reading RPM Method for Social Satisfaction! 

References

• Atkins, P. et al. (2019). Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups.
• Baumeister, R. et al. (2001). Bad is stronger than good.
• Bhanji, J. & Delgado, M. (2013). The social brain and reward: Social information processing in the human striatum.
• Cherry, K. (2023). Intrinsic motivation vs. extrinsic motivation: What’s the difference? Verywell Mind.
• Cohen, G. (2022). Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides.
• Heaney, E. (2023). Balancing attachment and autonomy. Psychology Today.
• Heerey, E. (2013). Learning from social rewards predicts individual differences in self-reported social ability.
• Hrehra, J. (n.d.). What is social reward in behavior change. Thebehavioralscientist.
• Hughes, J. (2020). Designing Social Play For Sky: Children of the Light [Video]. YouTube / Game Developers Conference.
• Lieberman, M. (2013). Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect.
• Matsumura, N. (2020). Shikake: The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Design.
• Cook, D. et al. (2016). Game design patterns that facilitate strangers becoming “friends”. Project Horseshoe.
• Ryan, R. & Deci, E. (2000). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: Classic definitions and new directions.
• Schafer, J. & Karlins, M. (2015). The Like Switch.
• Tamir, D. & Hughes, B. (2018). Social Rewards: From Basic Social Building Blocks to Complex Social Behavior.
• Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness.