The Gardens of Grey Nax

Colville — Towards Better Rewards

4 min read

Matthew Colville — Towards Better Rewards

Reference: game design, incentive architecture, reward structures

Source: Matthew Colville, “Towards Better Rewards” (MCDM Productions, YouTube). See also: MCDM’s Draw Steel RPG system.

The Core Principle

The behavior a game rewards is the behavior a game encourages.

This is stated as a game design principle but is a general claim about incentive architecture. If you want to understand what a system is actually for — as opposed to what it claims to be for — look at what it rewards. The reward structure is the communication layer. It tells participants, more honestly than any mission statement, what behavior the system selects for.

This works in reverse too: if you know how a system rewards participants, you can deduce what behavior it’s trying to produce. And if the behavior being produced isn’t what you want, the fix is to change what the system rewards — not to motivate people harder.

The D&D Case Study

Colville uses the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons reward structures to illustrate the principle with unusual clarity, because the same players play across different editions and the behavioral differences are stark.

Classic D&D (1970s–80s): Gold found = experience points. One XP per gold piece, regardless of what you did with it. Magic items were rare and necessary for advancement. Result: players were intensely curious, proactive, exploratory, and risk-tolerant. They showed up motivated and engaged because the reward structure made curiosity and proactivity the dominant strategy for advancement.

4th and 5th edition D&D: Gold is largely useless. Magic items are rare and granted by the DM. Leveling is tied to milestones or session attendance — everyone levels at the same rate regardless of engagement. Result: players become passive. They show up on game night and wait for the DM to create all the motivation. They don’t explore, don’t pursue personal goals, don’t show initiative.

Colville’s diagnosis: passive players are not lazy or disengaged by character. They are responding rationally to a reward structure that doesn’t differentiate between engaged and disengaged behavior. The same players, in a system that rewards curiosity, become intensely curious. The system produces the behavior.

The Fix: Goal-Oriented Rewards

Colville’s proposed solution is simple: make the connection between behavior and reward explicit and visible. A card with a clear goal on one side and a clear reward on the other. The player can see what behavior is being asked for and what they’ll get for it.

The key insight: this isn’t manipulation, it’s legibility. The reward was always there — leveling up, gaining abilities, advancing the story. What was missing was the explicit link between specific player behavior and that reward. Making it visible changes behavior dramatically, not because the incentives changed but because the communication layer became clear.

Application Beyond Game Design

The principle generalizes directly. Any system that wants to produce a particular behavior needs to:

  1. Identify the behavior it actually wants
  2. Design rewards that make that behavior the dominant strategy
  3. Make the connection between behavior and reward legible to participants

This is the same claim as the Nash equilibrium framing in Cooperation as Dominant Strategy: you cannot ask people to cooperate, you have to make cooperation the optimal move. Colville’s contribution is the design language and the concrete illustration of how reward structure shapes behavior independently of character or motivation.

The capitalism critique in Cooperation as Dominant Strategy is this same principle operating at scale: late-stage capitalism isn’t producing negligent, exploitative behavior because the people in it are bad. It’s producing that behavior because the reward structure — quarterly earnings, stock price, liability math — makes defection the dominant strategy. The system rewards what it gets.

Relevance to Wellspring

Wellspring’s structural work — CLT ground lease, cooperative governance, frozen carrying costs, gift economy infrastructure — is game design in Colville’s sense. Each element changes what behavior the system rewards:

  • Frozen carrying costs reward staying and investing rather than extracting and leaving
  • Cooperative governance rewards participation rather than free-riding
  • Gift economy infrastructure rewards generosity as self-reinforcing rather than self-depleting
  • Shared maintenance obligations reward collective investment in the commons

The question to ask of any design decision: what behavior does this reward? If the answer isn’t the behavior Wellspring wants to produce, the design needs to change — not the residents.

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