Motivation, Transmedia and Getting INnovative.

The video relates in a lot of ways to some great understandings of human behaviour - that, perhaps, the carrot and the stick model aren't working for a number of reasons.

This is a huge step in how we look at the development of, say, a game or writing a script for an online source, or a web series - or even looking to incentivizing for fundraising. The consistent and ongoing thought with regard to, say, a game is that if you offer a huge reward ($10,000) people will show up - sure they will. But maybe they won't.

For something basic - for a basic physical task, as the video shows: "As long as the task used only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as expected" - the higher the pay, the better the performance. Thus, for someone working primarily on something not cognitive based - a repetitive action, per se, the ideal goal is thus - higher pay. Or a bigger reward - or a nicer farm in farmville.

That said, "once the task called for rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward lead to poorer performance."

This is definitely an interesting way to look at building online properties - to understand that at the end of the day should the task require, say, more than simply madly clicking the actual monetary reward doesn't matter (so much), and that using that understanding should thus lead to the idea of building a paradigm that people can work in - small rewards, but having greater buy in (and more complex problems) isn't a bad thing.

Especially since, as they continue to discuss, a lot of people that could easily be involved with more complex transmedia projects - like an ARG or similar - are often the ones that will spend 20-30 hours working on something like wikipedia or Linux... for free.