I almost built the obvious thing.
When I started designing RealWorld RPG, the plan included ready-made quest packs: a tidy library of pre-written tasks a parent could switch on with a tap. The payoff in the game always works the same way: a kid finishes a real-world task, the parent approves it, and the kid is then guaranteed a reward, a new sword, a fresh piece of armour, something real for their character, plus XP every single time. The pre-made pack would have been a ready menu of tasks, “do the dishes,” “read for twenty minutes,” “tidy your room,” each wired to that guaranteed payoff. It’s the convenient version, the one that scales without me in the room, and pretty much every chore app on the market is built exactly that way.
Then I read the psychology behind rewards, and I quietly took the feature out.
This is the honest story of a thing I decided not to ship, and the rule it leaves behind, which you can use whether or not my game ever touches your house.
The idea that stopped me cold
There’s an effect psychologists call overjustification. In plain terms: if you start giving a child an external reward for something they already enjoy and would do on their own, the reward can crowd out their own interest. The activity stops being “the thing I love” and becomes “the thing I get paid for.” And when the reward goes away, the interest often doesn’t fully come back.
The classic demonstration is a 1973 study where kids who loved drawing were split into groups. The ones who were promised a reward for drawing later drew less, and with less care, than the kids who drew for nothing. The reward didn’t boost their love of drawing. It replaced it, and then evaporated.
I’ll be straight about when this landed for me: it wasn’t a clever hunch I’d had all along. The penny only dropped while I was actually reading the research. And once it dropped, I couldn’t un-see what it meant for pre-made quests.
Why a generic quest pack is quietly dangerous
A ready-made quest can’t know your child.
Picture a quest pack with “read for twenty minutes” baked in. For a kid who avoids books, that’s perfect: reading has low pull for them, so a reward is a fair nudge toward something genuinely good. But hand that exact same quest to a kid who already disappears into books for fun, and you’ve done something subtly harmful. You’ve taken their favourite thing and turned it into a task they grind for in-game rewards. You’ve put a price on a passion.
Now scale that up. If I ship one quest library to thousands of families, it will inevitably reward some kids for the very things they already love. I have no way, from the outside, to tell which child is which. And the cost of getting it wrong isn’t “the feature works a bit less well.” The cost is a kid who used to love reading, or drawing, or building, learning to see it as work.
I’m not willing to build something that might do that, even to a minority of kids, even by accident.
What I’m building instead, and why it’s harder
So pre-made quests are off the table as the default. Quests have to be custom to the individual child, set up through a short conversation with the parent, and aimed only at things the kid genuinely wouldn’t do without a push. The boring stuff. The teeth-pulling stuff. Never the things they’d happily do anyway.
That decision costs me a lot. It means I can’t just flip a switch and scale; there’s a human consultation in the loop. It’s slower, it’s more work, and it’s harder to grow. The pre-made version would have been so much easier to sell.
But it’s the only version I can actually stand behind, and building in public means admitting that the principled choice is usually the inconvenient one.
The rule you can take from this
You don’t need my game to use the useful part. If you reward your kids for anything, sticker charts, screen time, pocket money, here’s the test the research leaves you with, and it takes five seconds:
Would my kid do this without any reward at all?
If the answer is yes, leave it alone. Don’t put a price on it. You’ll only risk turning something they love into something they do for the prize.
If the answer is no, that’s a fair thing to reward. The genuinely unappealing tasks, the ones that were never going to happen on their own, are exactly where a reward does real good and has almost nothing to crowd out.
Reward the broccoli, not the dessert. Protect the things they’d reach for anyway.
That single rule reshaped my entire game. It’s also, I think, the most useful thing I can hand a parent, no app required.