mooism recently posted a link to a web game called ‘Tringo’: http://www.donnerwood.com/tringo.html.

He said his current high score was 278, so I had a go at the game to see what would happen. For those unwilling to go and play it themselves, the game involves trying to fit a sequence of loosely Tetris-like pieces into a square grid, and getting points for forming a complete rectangle of filled squares which then vanish. If you can't fit a particular piece in at all, you can skip it, and points are deducted.

I immediately found a strong sense of motivation to get through a round without having to skip a piece. However, having succeeded at that (and scored somewhere in the region of 240) I felt no urge whatever to try again and attempt to finish with a higher score.

I think I'm fundamentally far more motivated by the desire to achieve specific qualitative goals than I am by quantitative challenges such as scoring as much as possible on the way to those goals. I'll pay attention to score-maximising play if it has a material advantage to me (such as an extra life or power-up every N points) which might help me reach a qualitative goal, but otherwise I generally have very little interest in score compared to more ‘natural’ milestones: if one person reaches level N of a game, whereas another person dies on level N-1 but has a higher score, I will not consider there to be any particularly interesting way in which the latter has done better.

(And no, I can't generally persuade myself to see ‘complete this game with a score of at least <previous high score> + 1’ as a you-either-do-it-or-you-don't qualitative goal; I spot immediately that it's a quantitative goal wearing a qualitative hat and am not fooled.)