[DaBackpack]

Yeah, you'd be surprised that reward mechanics in video games is a serious academic discipline. (Often in terms of serious games, or crowdsourcing games where intrinsic reward might be minimal)

It's not quite the same as the paper described, but one of my lab mates is writing her dissertation on a systematic exploration of the kinds of reward signals that players are most receptive to for... grindy, perhaps monotonous games where intrinsic reward is minimal. That is, games that might not be "fun" in a traditional sense.

Her ontology is "narrative reward", "leaderboard/score reward", and "collection/customization reward", just going from memory. Part of her research was about balancing and scaling score-based reward signals to encourage replay. I'll have to ask her what she eventually landed on. I'd imagine that a logistic curve would suit a general audience, since diminishing returns at the upper echelons of skill:

1) Suggest an upper bound for maximum performance, something that you make incremental progress towards. Some games have HUGE score differentials between skill tiers, which makes it impossible to determine how close your given score is to an optimal "perfect score"... or more importantly, how much skill you require to reach this.

2) Newer players are less likely to be discouraged when they see their scores in the middle of the logistic curve. How disheartening can it be to see that your starting score is orders of magnitude below some higher scores? With a logistic curve, your score of 0.5 is still in the ballpark of 0.85, so you are more likely to try to improve your score to reach this landmark because it is actually "in reach". (Of course, the skill differential doesn't change, it's just a matter of how numbers can be used to encourage or discourage mindsets of personal improvement).

But I don't play FFR so I don't know what the common perspectives on scoring curves are around here