The Impact of Achievements & Trophies -- Recognition that Motivates

That was one of the questions that Gene and Majel Barrett-Roddenberry struggled to answer when they collaborated on the ambitious project to expand the history and the background of the fictional Star Trek Universe -- creating a 28 volume set of loose-leaf paper in binders that was unofficially called Encyclopedia Star Trek -- with the ultimate goal of leaving a legacy document and reference source that script writers would be able to use to create future Star Trek licensed entertainment -- whether that be movies or TV or something new. Roddenberry must have sensed the approach of the fourth horseman -- for he passed away on October 24, 1991 (aged 70) with the Encyclopedia barely completed weeks before. His widow, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, passed away on December 18, 2008 (aged 76) having revised and edited the project several times over, renaming it the Star Trek Bible.

The world that was imagined and described by the Roddenberry's was one that was largely based upon the intelligent predictions for our own future. The apocalyptic vision ultimately comes down to wealth or the lack of it -- with the collapse of the oil and petrochemical empires in the Middle East causing the region to revert to the poverty levels that largely dominated the region in the latter half of the 19th Century prior to the massive influence and wealth that was granted to the region by virtue of its huge and up until then untapped oil resources.

Roddenberry was a serous reader -- and the predictions of the economists John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton (1883 - 1946), a British Economist whose ideas profoundly influenced the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857 - 1929), an American economist and sociologist who is best known for his masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) -- the pair collectively had a profound impact upon his view of the future that would eventually serve as the basis for much of the future history he would write for the Star Trek Universe.

At first the resource was used for the ongoing motion picture projects and then for the TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation, followed by the overlapping television shows Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager; they had monumental task ahead of them. The world within the world of Star Trek was one of dichotomy in extreme examples, with civilization barely surviving a global economic crash with the world having exhausted nearly all complex carbon-based exploitable fuels.

Considering the post-crash utopian vision that Gene Roddenberry originally conceived for the stories, and the fleshing-out of that vision between the pair of them, there was a lot of meat on the bone to be chewed through -- but the idea of a utopian existence is not really that great a leap when you take into consideration the fact that the pair spent much of their formative years living through what is arguably one of the most turbulent periods in modern human history.

Even with the elimination of wealth and greed as the primary motivation for human relations, and with science and technology providing a monetary-free means for feeding the world and promoting higher education (utopia), it is still necessary to devise methods for motivating the populace in a manner that is free of violence, being strictly voluntary and by necessity these motivating trends needed to be more cerebral; closer to what we see in active use today outside of that fictional world, and while these Achievements have no real or monetary value, their interpreted personal value in terms of position, respect, and community value directly compensate for any lack of intrinsic value, allowing them to function as a serious form of motivation on a community level. Does that sound familiar?

There are many theories about the underlying science of motivation -- and most of the experts agree that when you come right down to the barest of essentials, the two basic forms of motivation consist of internal and external influences that represent the mixture of reasons why you do, achieve, behave, learn, and react the way that you do.

Identity in one form or another has always played a major role in the process of personal motivation -- and the most powerful of all forms has always been how the individual regards themselves and how they perceive the image of themselves through the eyes of the community. Whether they have been intrinsically or extrinsically motivated, every behavior has an underlying cause, and through understanding that cause the process of manipulating behavior and motivating factors is a key element in improving the desired outcome for a given event -- and while this basic philosophy is present throughout the Star Trek Universe, would it surprise you to learn that it is also the underlying foundation for the Achievement System in our own?!

Its most basic manifestation is in the form of rank, awards, medals, trophies, and other forms of personal recognition -- with the emphasis upon the word *personal* in this process. In the utopia that exists in the Star Trek Universe -- a utopia that a considerable percentage of the current world population would like to see come to fruition -- there is no more powerful a motivating force, and rthe parallels that can easily be drawn between that imaginary history and the gamer community are surprisingly consistent.