I was listening to some recent episodes of This Americn Life when I discovered an episode filled with stories centered around amusement parks. As someone whose devotion to roller coasters as a teenager included riding one for thirty minutes without getting up out of my seat, my curiousity was... let's just say "piqued" since that's such a great word.

Piqued. Sorry, I can't help myself.

It turned out the episode focused a lot on amusement park games. Of particular note is the tale of Cole Lindbergh, the manager for all the carnival-style games at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, Missouri. Much of the story centered around his management style, a style that the piece astutely observes is similar to Michael Scott's style on The Office. One of his tactics is competition; namely, he has the workers at the different games compete to see which one can earn the most money.

I don't find this strategy effective in of itself. In one of my previous jobs, my coworkers and I were awarded the chance to win prizes for higher performance. Most of us saw through that and demanded actual benefits for stellar performance (hint: we wanted something green... and it wasn't a $10 Starbucks gift card).

The important part of these competitions is what they inspire Cole and his crew to do. The employees started devising tactics that would get their games to the top of the money earner list. Some strategies were as simple as rigging the game so that the players would win a bit more often. Other tactics involved wearing a banana suit. If that's not the definition of war, then the military should probably be glad I never responded to any of the recruiting letters they mailed me.

It's not just the employees are directly involved in figuring out how to win. Cole actively encourages his employees, telling them when something isn't working right. Cole Lindbergh is a good game designer who provides his players with well-designed achievements.

<Phoenix Wright>OBJECTION!</Phoneix Wright>

What? It should be obvious I wasn't just talking about effective management strategies! This story reminded me of the whole "good achievement versus bad achievement" debate. The way I see it, "bad achievements" are the ones that only exist to provide incentive to keep playing the game through grinding. I'm talking about the ridiculous "level up all the classes to 75" achievements in Final Fantasy XI or the "get 200 kills in multiplayer on 50 different days" achievement in Unreal Tournament 3. While I'm guilty of attempting the last one back when I was actually competing with friends to get a high Gamerscore, I can't say I look back on attempting to earn that achievement with any fondness.

On the other hand, I do recall my recent attempt to try completing Mirror's Edge without using a gun to obtain the "Pacifist" achievement. I can even recall the exact place in one of the later levels where I was starting to regret making this attempt. With a little bit of practice and cleverness, I managed to complete the level en route to earning a whopping 80 Gamerscore points (hmm... maybe the Starbucks gift card wasn't such a bad reward after all). The important thing is that a "good achievement" like that one encourages the player to play the game in a new way. That's what Cole is doing with his competitions. He's not just dangling a carrot on a stick - he's creating new and interesting ways of obtaining that carrot.

All of this seems timely given the small Twitter debate (or as I just decided to start calling it, Twitbate) started by Jason Caffoe's analysis of Mafia Wars creator and current Zynga employee Roger Dickey's monetization strategies. Many of Dickey's tips are the strategies that push games more toward being activity-inducing reward machines than fun experiences.

So c'mon devs: reward players for doing cool things, not grinding. Unless the game is a skateboarding game. In that case, grinding is cool.