Reward Systems of Games in Education
The Grind, Feedback, and Lootboxes
School is a grind, probably the longest grind the average person does in the developed world, and that's the part most people don't like about it. Also, for a majority of it, it isn't tangibly rewarding either in regard to preparing for work in the knowledge economy, as many years need to be devoted to foundations before modern career skills can even be attempted, and so there's not much you can do with all that education till they're a couple decades into it. This leaves teachers with few options for giving students tangible and meaningful rewards to recognize their hard work in a school environment. Some try words of encouragement, candy, food, free time, trips, detention, sitting out in the hall, scolding, all different reinforcement and punishment strategies that either work or don't and are very hard to control for extraneous effects on the individual level when you have high student:teacher ratios, and every student can't be rewarded differently for different work. It's an out-dated system based on that isn't very efficient at what it's intended to do in this context.
One of the wonders of games is that people can spend hours and hours doing what seems like mind-numbingly boring tasks to "farm" for objects or to level-up via slowly-gained xp in videogames, and they seem completely fine doing that, no matter how much they complain, and why is that? For games with randomized loot, it's about taking advantage of the human tendency towards gambling, betting one's time in return for a chance at an end goal. This is why the gaming industry has turned towards microtransactions in lootboxes as a revenue stream, because it works. (though I find it morally reprehensible in that case) The mechanics though are very useful and can be implemented in educational games to generate a high response rate through variable-ratio reinforcement of behavior, with the caveat that the game is designed well as mentioned throughout the website.
Dr. Tom Chatfield gave a TED talk on this, called "7 Ways Video Games Engage the Brain" that I'll link to below, and in it, another one of the things he talks about is how games are so good at giving feedback and collecting data, because in a virtual world, everything can be measured, and the data compiled automatically to show trends, outliers, potential issues, new and innovative player approaches to content, bugs in the system, and lots of other analytical data that would require a massive undertaking outside in the real world to accomplish with all the paperwork alone. This kind of instant feedback on all work accomplished, to both students and teachers, can therefore be a powerful tool for giving in-depth analyses on student's development.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyamsZXXF2w&t=1s