However, empirically we've seen that touching token allocations causes huge amount of resentment and is very, very difficult to do in an elastic manner. Demands of the business can arise in hours or days, token allocation tweaks take years to take effect. We've seen that people will react -- within seconds -- to non-token incentives to do things that certainly resemble work. Blizzard can make a database entry with a few purple pixels attached and wham several million people start doing very repetitive tasks to achieve it. Think of the business value that could be harnessed if a little alert on my dashboard said "Hey Patrick, that funky Mersenne Twister re-implementation that has been in purgatory for the last 12 weeks and is now blocking delivery now is offering purple pixels for unit testing!"
I know you can game any system for rewards -- it has been a near obsession of mine since a kid, when I found that 89.5% is still an A- and that meant I could still miss 3 homework assignments and not suffer any consequences as long as I did really well on the tests. Like was mentioned in the video posted yesterday, everyone knows that grades are a game... its just an unsophisticated game that sucks, but nonetheless seems to converge on education for many people. Grades as a game have always been Pong in a world where Pacman exists... now they're Pong in a world where WoW exists. (Or even where Farmville exists.) Holy cow, we can abuse that better. ("Little Timmy learned 7 * 8 = 56. Ding, Mathematician Level 14! Gratz Timmy!")
This is mostly a function of a particular method of token allocation, rather than a property of the tokens. There are entire lines of work where the allocation is quite elastic - people who work on commission, people who make a significant part of their income based on performance bonuses, etc. Even at start-ups, in my experience, bonuses for important milestones are not all that uncommon, even if they often are, well, token.
I know you can game any system for rewards -- it has been a near obsession of mine since a kid, when I found that 89.5% is still an A- and that meant I could still miss 3 homework assignments and not suffer any consequences as long as I did really well on the tests. Like was mentioned in the video posted yesterday, everyone knows that grades are a game... its just an unsophisticated game that sucks, but nonetheless seems to converge on education for many people. Grades as a game have always been Pong in a world where Pacman exists... now they're Pong in a world where WoW exists. (Or even where Farmville exists.) Holy cow, we can abuse that better. ("Little Timmy learned 7 * 8 = 56. Ding, Mathematician Level 14! Gratz Timmy!")