A Typology of Videogame Rewards
Karhulahti, V. M., & Aarseth, E. (2023, June). A Typology of Videogame Rewards. In Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2023 Conference: Limits and Margins of Games.
Although component-driven structural approaches to videogames have been present at least since the 1980s (e.g., Ziegfeld 1989), the industries of game design and production evolve rapidly, thus tending to make many such contributions either relevant to a specific time or needing frequent updates (for typological and taxonomic models in the early 2000s, see Aarseth et al. 2003; Björk & Holopainen 2005; Wood et al. 2004; Elverdam & Aarseth 2007; Zagal et al. 2007; King et al. 2010). A parallel critical
challenge in all such approaches is that they generally pursue a means to analyse or classify gaming holistically, i.e. mapping structures across multiple levels. Because videogames involve a potentially infinite number of highly complex structural levels from audiovisual and narrative domains to challenge and spatiotemporal levels, any holistic approach that aims to chart them comprehensively will quickly need to compromise and generalise, which again leads to pragmatic questions (Karhulahti
2020). Due to these issues, an increasing trend over the past decade has been to focus on selected structural levels instead. The present study does exactly this by providing a structural typology of rewards, which occur specifically in videogames.