When you kill a player in Call of Duty, glory killing in Doom, cleaning a line in Tetris, rewarding or satisfaction?
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They are just different feelings in general not just in games, but they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s hard to explain but rewarding comes from a sense of accomplishment, this can be satisfying as well but so can things that are not rewarding. For example boating over waves in gta can be kinda satisfying to me when you jump and land pretty much directly on the next wave and so on, this isn’t rewarding because it is not difficult and can be done simply by boating on waves. Not the best example but you get the point. Google could probably give you a better explanation of the difference if you are still confused.
I would say the examples you gave are rewarding and satisfying, atleast to most people.
Rewards (a thing you give the player) lead to a sense of satisfaction (A feeling felt by the player). When you’re making a game, your primary goal is to make the player feel satisfied, and you need to figure out which rewards you’re going to use and how you’re going to use them to achieve that. If you don’t give *some* kind of reward for a behaviour, that behaviour is going to have felt unsatisfying and/or pointless. That reward can be all sorts of things, from an interesting story point or good bit of character development, to a cool piece of loot or XP towards a level up, to even just something aesthetically pleasing like a “You have successfully killed a player without dying, good job” noise.
Think of it like this,
You have a difficult task to do, this task takes a long time to do. When you finish the task you should be “satisfied”, IE you should recieve a feeling of accomplishment, this does not necessarily mean you get a reward. Achievements are a great example of satisfaction in video games, there is no reward for completing them, other than the feeling of accomplishing something great.
On the other hand, if you completed that difficult task, and then you got some arbitrary reward, that reward determines how much a player will want to complete that task, instead of just completing the task because it is there.
In video game design you have to make a choice whether you feel a certain task should be rewarded, or let the player just feel the satisfaction of completing said task. Depending on which you choose you should change the task to fit. You can also choose to combine the two concepts.
They seem to be the same, but they are fundamentally different. Though often connected, they are not interchangeable.
A reward is something given to the player. Satisfaction is something felt by the player. Being given a reward can feel satisfying, if, and only if, it feels like it is deserved. If the player knows he played badly and gets rewarded for it, that reward will not be satisfying because it will feel like it’s patronizing. A participation trophy. The player will be rewarded, but he will not feel satisfaction.
On the other hand, even defeat can be satisfying if the experience is good. A good deathmatch against a superior enemy can be satisfying when you can feel that it did take that opponent a great deal of skill to defeat you, the satisfaction will come from knowing that you did play well but were eventually defeated. You don’t get a reward, you will not receive any accolades for losing, but it may be a satisfying experience.
You’ll notice that in the end, it is far more interesting to most players to be satisfied. Handing out freebies is not going to reach that goal, though.
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