Summary
Neal and Jana Hallford, in Swords and Circuitry: A Designer’s Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games (2001), classify game rewards by what they give the player: glory, sustenance, access and facility. The scheme is simple enough to audit any game’s reward list with, and it complements other ways of classifying rewards by timing, structure and predictability.
Key ideas
| Type | What it gives | Examples | Changes how you play? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glory | Recognition: proof you did it | Achievements, titles, high scores, trophies, cosmetic badges | No: it tells everyone (including you) what you achieved |
| Sustenance | The means to keep going | Health, ammo, armour, extra lives, fuel | It maintains what you have |
| Access | New places or content | Keys, unlocked areas, new levels, new story chapters | It opens content you couldn’t reach |
| Facility | New powers or abilities | Double jump, new weapons, bigger inventory, new spells | It expands what you can do |
Rewards also carry information (“you did that right”) and set the pace of the game: when the next reward arrives shapes the rhythm of play.
Other ways to classify the same rewards
These are not alternatives to Hallford’s types but different axes; any reward has a position on each.
- Time frame: short-term vs long-term. Short-term rewards arrive every few seconds (coins, XP ticks, hit markers) and keep the moment moving; long-term rewards arrive after sustained effort (finishing a quest line, beating a boss) and give the session a reason. They map onto fast and slow game-loops.
- Structure: tiered vs milestone. Tiered rewards grow with the player’s level (bronze, silver, gold; better gear at each tier) and need clear criteria and visible progress. Milestone rewards mark reaching a defined, announced point (a chapter, a score) and work best when tied to the story.
- Predictability: fixed vs random. Fixed rewards (quest rewards, level-up bonuses) are clear and easy to balance but can feel monotonous; random rewards (drops, loot) add surprise but can feel unfair and, with money attached, gambling-like. These correspond to reinforcement schedules (see reward-systems and loot-systems).
In practice
- Audit your reward list. Write down every reward in your prototype and tag it with a type. Lopsided lists are a warning sign:
- All glory: nothing changes how the game plays; motivation depends on players caring about recognition.
- All sustenance: the player is kept alive but never grows.
- All facility: power can snowball, trivialising later challenges (see progression-and-power-curves).
- No access: the world never opens up, which hurts exploration-driven players.
- Layer a single reward. One event can do several jobs: in Super Mario Bros a coin is a short-term reward; every 100 coins give an extra life (sustenance); the coin trail also guides the jump (information) (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
- Match types to players. Achievement-driven players value glory; explorers value access; players who like mastery value facility that opens new techniques (see bartle-taxonomy).
- In Unity, a simple way to keep the audit honest is to tag reward definitions with an enum and count them:
public enum RewardType { Glory, Sustenance, Access, Facility }
[CreateAssetMenu(menuName = "Rewards/Reward")]
public class RewardDefinition : ScriptableObject
{
public string displayName;
public RewardType type;
public bool isRandomDrop; // fixed vs random
public bool isMilestone; // milestone vs tiered/incremental
}Evidence
- Hallford and Hallford (2001) proposed the four types in the context of computer role-playing games, where all four are present and balancing them is a core design task.
- The course lecture series teaches the four types alongside short/long-term, tiered/milestone and fixed/random rewards, with the check that “if every reward in your game is glory, nothing changes how you play; if every reward is facility, the game can snowball” (course lecture series, see source-player-psychology-lectures).
Implications
- Access and facility rewards feed back into play itself, which arguably makes them less prone to the overjustification-effect than glory rewards, which sit outside the activity.
- Glory rewards are the core of points-badges-leaderboards gamification, which helps explain why PBL alone often fades.
- Reward design is also an ethical question: random rewards bought with money are where reward design meets dark-patterns.
Open questions
- The scheme was written for RPGs. How well does it cover rewards in non-RPG genres, such as a satisfying physics reaction in a sandbox, which is arguably “aesthetic” rather than any of the four?
- Where do social rewards (a friend’s reaction, a team win) fit? Arguably they are glory, but they behave differently from an achievement pop-up.
Related
- reward-systems — reward loops, schedules and feedback
- game-loops — fast and slow loops that deliver rewards
- progression-and-power-curves — facility rewards and power growth
- loot-systems — random reward design
- overjustification-effect — when rewards replace intrinsic interest
- gamification — glory-heavy reward systems outside games
- bartle-taxonomy — which players value which rewards
- source-player-psychology-lectures