Pokopia's Rewardless Quest Design

Why would you undertake a quest? 

The next time Gandalf walks into your life offering to send you to some distant mountain where you must chuck a piece of jewelry into the fires from whence it was made, what could possibly make you want to do that? After all, the alternative is to sit at home and eat some nice muffins baked by your beautiful neighbor while someone plays a lute and a bird chirps in the branches of a nearby oak. 

Usually a quest exists to return the world to a state of normalcy. The one ring must be destroyed or else an army of evil will march in and prevent me from listening to lutes and birds. Someone has to do this quest, the question is just whether or not it will be me. Other quests might exist because the evil army has already stormed my village and now I want the lutes and/or birds back. 

When you’re building a video game, however, you’re usually doing a quest for some magical boots. You want those +3 Gauntlets of Power Lifting? Gunna have to kill 10 dire rats for Farmer Joann. This is the standard structure that’s kept the industry going for the last 30 years or more, but Pokemon Pokopia has now arrived on the scene and is here to build a socialist utopia with blood and fire!

What makes a Pokopia quest? 

Let’s look at a late-game quest that won’t spoil anything juicy. My example will be Dragonite’s inexplicable need for 5 alarm clocks, because who among us cannot relate to that? More specifically because the pitch for that quest is, itself, so narratively rich that even what little I’ve written thus far has likely already captured your interests. It takes a good piece of writing to latch onto your emotions so fast, and that’s exactly the kind of thing that’s worth studying.

For this quest, I’ve found a video on YouTube which shows the entire thing from start to finish. You may wish to watch this 3-minute video as part of reading this blog post.

How To Get The 5 Alarm Clocks From The Cave For Dragonite In Pokemon Pokopia | Quick Guide

The Premise

As with any good story, Dragonite’s quest is about something universally relatable pushed to an extreme. Dragonite is sleepy. Not only is Dragonite sleepy, but Dragonite is so extremely sleepy that the only solution is multiple alarm clocks. Narratively this gives us a clear, simple character trait to assign to Dragonite. We understand who they are, they’re someone who wants to get things done but needs some help to do it. While Snorlax is content to be asleep, Dragonite wants to be productive but has trouble accomplishing that goal. 

The Execution

In a game where the gameplay is about bringing things to places, this quest is perfect. We are informed about Dragonite’s character trait, and tasked to help them overcome that weakness by bringing them an item. The text only needs to setup the character trait. After that is established, the player can go forth into the world with a clear goal: Find 5 alarm clocks. This could be accomplished in multiple ways, crafting the clocks or finding them, as long as Dragonite gets what they need in the end.

The Reward

There isn’t one! While most games would reward you for your time with some +1 Boots of Sneaking, this is where Pokopia gets truly interesting. Reward design in this game doesn’t need to center on magical items because this game’s entire system is itself a reward loop. This begs a very important question:

Why do we give out quest rewards in the first place?

Well the answer to that can be found in various psychological theories of human motivation, but today’s psych theory will be Self Determination Theory. SDT states that humans do things because they want to express themself through Competence, Relatedness, and/or Autonomy. To simplify that, people do things because it helps them demonstrate how useful they are, helps them build a community, or helps them to create a more-defined sense of self. +1 Boots of Sneaking are good because they help to define your build, which is an expression of your Competence and Autonomy. Those boots also signify you as someone using a sneaking build, which means you’re in a group of all those other people who also have sneaking builds. Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy in these quests exist within the reward for them. The reward is what you truly want, the quest is the obstacle.

What Pokopia is doing is putting the Competence, Relatedness, and Autonomy all in the quest itself instead of in the reward. 

The central premise of Pokopia is that you are building a community around yourself after the world was destroyed and both humans and Pokemon disappeared. Your role, as ditto, is to rebuild what was lost. SDT is a psychological theory that is built around the core idea of human motivation essentially coming as a result of trying to be a member of a community. A game about literally building your own community will absolutely ping every single part of your brain for all its good brain juices, at least according to that theory. 

In most fantasy games your goal is to become the most powerful person in the world. You can achieve that goal by completing quests which give you magical boots, but the purpose of those quests is to make you more powerful. It’s all about you. Those NPCs only exist to serve you. A lot of players do not feel like there’s much point in helping others within that framework because that framework is just extractive anyway. I don’t need to even read about Farmer Joann’s plight, it doesn’t matter to me that her virtual children are dying, they’re not even real. All I want from this fake person is the magic boots she’s keeping locked up in a virtual storage room I can’t otherwise access. I can’t care about her because I will never see her again, she’s not part of the system. In fact, the only person who IS part of the system is me, so I can burn everything else to the ground as long as I achieve the goal of becoming powerful and killing god (or whatever the main quest is about).

What if your source of power was a community instead? What if living the best life meant having the best community? Well obviously then you would start to care about the members of that community. You would try to find the best community members to include in your society and make sure that they had the resources they needed to thrive. Rather than having to be told about Farmer Joann’s sob story, you just need to know that Farmer Joann produces vegetables that make your community resistant to famine. You thrive if she thrives, the call to action is coming from the foundation of your own power base. At that point if she wants 10 dire rats killed, you don’t even need to know why. Competence comes in demonstrating that you can kill those dire rats for her. Relatedness comes from you being able to brag about how productive your little community has become. Autonomy comes in your ability to choose whether to do her quest or prioritize someone else’s first.

In this system, you don’t need to be given a pair of magic boots. What you’re building is a base of power that relies upon the people that are part of that system, and helping them becomes the thing that matters to you the most. Dragonite needs 5 alarms to wake up in the morning? Ok! Dragonite gets 5 alarms, then! In return, my community’s overall power goes up, I unlock all sorts of new items and abilities, and I am that much closer to achieving my goal. 

The quest reward may not come from Dragonite, but that’s because it can come from anyone. You get your reward when overall happiness increases for the community, and that reward is an increase in the number of items available at the pokecenter. When you increase your community’s score, you unlock a new set of items. You can then use those items to build a better town, which is also the tool you use to express yourself in the game. You want autonomy? You want to demonstrate your competence? Ok, then help Dragonite, and everyone else, and you’ll get more of both. Individual quests may not be rewarded, but that’s only because we’ve shifted the rewards to come from any and all actions that benefit society as a whole.

By shifting rewards away from the individual, we create a system that incentivizes communal action. Dragonite is no longer responsible for convincing you to help, all helpful actions are rewarded. Whether you read the details of Dragonite’s story isn’t so important because you’re motivated to help them either way. You already know that what you’re doing is bringing life back to the world by helping everyone around you to thrive and be happy, so when one more person asks for help, you already want to do that. 

The difference is that the system here becomes the story we’re telling. The rewards don’t come from the individuals, it comes from the overall action within that system. It’s not gathering 5 alarm clocks that gets you what you want, it’s helping people. You can choose to help anyone, that reward comes from every possible helpful action equally. Your choice is just one of priority, deciding who gets helped first. 

There are writing benefits to this shift as well. Not needing to establish player motivation in our quests means we can shift our focus to more important matters. Dragonite doesn’t need to beg me for sympathy, their quest can just be about establishing a character trait. Writing advice tells us that interesting characters with memorable traits will be the most well-received, so this now means we’re focused on the most narratively-rich parts of our storytelling. Dragonite is a sleepy lil guy who needs comically large amounts of alarm clocks to wake up. This is already so much better than “Farmer Joann’s family is dying, please help, I’ll give you boots!”

It’s the difference between me begging you to play a game with me, and me making a game sound so appealing that you can’t help but want to play. Intrinsic motivation vs Extrinsic motivation, our second psych principle of the blog post. Traditional quest structure bakes into itself the bizarre idea that game designers should be pleading with the player to motivate them to play. “If you go kill 10 dire rats, I’ll reward you with a slightly better sword!!” we say over and over until you’ve spent 100 hours in our world. Pokopia provides a better path. Give the player a strong overall goal made of things they want to do anyway, then make individual tasks within that reward structure. Then you connect those tasks to interesting characters they want to interact with. By taking the rewards out of the hands of these individual characters and attaching it instead to the thing the player is intrinsically motivated towards, you create a stronger loop. It’s not the individual request that is rewarded, it’s any participation within the system. That gives the player more ability to choose what characters they respond to the most, it lets them choose how they want to participate. More autonomy, no loss of competence or relatedness.

It’s also easier to write a single system’s worth of motivation than to try to motivate the player every single time they speak to a quest giver. The king is offering a bounty for anyone who assists the people of the kingdom, the CEO is paying out bonuses for anyone who participates in their new app. Creating the fantasy here now aligns with your core loop and forces your team to better define the central loop of their game. I’m talking about the writing here because this is a narrative design blog, but hopefully you can already see that this benefits the rest of the team as well. Knowing that the core loop of your game is “The king is offering a bounty for anyone who assists the people of the kingdom” means you can state that clearly for your entire production, which means every choice everyone makes can further support that central design pillar. It’s clearer for the player, it’s clearer for your team.

Once you’ve built your core loop, once you have that single sentence pitch for it, now you can expand on everything we’ve talked about so far and decide where and when to break your own rules. If you want to tell a story about the king, you can do it through the quest loop. He says he’ll reward everyone who helps the people of the kingdom, but he responds differently if you help THAT group of people. The king rewards you for helping the peasants, but the dark wizard is offering even better rewards for punishing those people instead. The king rewards you for helping the peasants, but the rich can afford to still give those individual quest rewards, so the incentives are better if you leave the peasants to rot. All of these are relatively small tweaks to the Pokopia formula I’ve described above, but are ridiculously rich places to explore within your game.

Individualism is brittle, you rely on repeating the same perfect formula over and over. Your ability to deviate within that formula is minimal because there are so many things riding on getting it right every single time. A single mistake within a system built entirely upon every individual motivating you perfectly tends to collapse. Pokopia shows us that we gain strength by working together towards a communal goal instead. Each individual quest is under much less pressure to be perfect because the system above them is providing the scaffolding they need to succeed. That simple shift into rewarding based on the overall system means each element within your system is able to express itself much more strongly, and the system’s output is much stronger as a result. So I’ll be walking away from this silly little pokemon spin-off with a much stronger grasp on designing and building quests, and a new set of tools to consider for my future productions. Hopefully you’ll join me! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Bad quest chains that is. Thanks for reading!