I could write an entire thread on "secrets" in games and how a majority of them rely on encouraging the player to do uninteresting things, relying on boredom to ensure not everything is found

And how this has trained a generation of players to rob themselves of pacing

See also: poorly designed achievements

Learning how to play a game is often about understanding the invisible expectations the game designer has of you.

Anytime you reward a behavior in a game, you're training the player that that's the "correct" way to play.

VERY SERIOUSLY keep that in mind when rewarding counterproductive or tedious actions, even as a joke, because these are the only "statements of intent" your players get, and they will take them seriously even if they have to bore themselves or even quit in frustration as a result

As with basically every creative field, it's fine to break these 'rules' with intent, but more often than not these issues crop up b/c of shallow attempts to create interest in ways that are cheap on the budget

Also: recognize, to put it sassily, that players are basically children and that when they 'act out' it's because they want attention https://twitter.com/MOOMANiBE/status/1254481879526334464

This kind of acknowledgement can be really simple too, even as small as a particle effect or sound effect. Ppl just wanna feel like whatever weird specific thing they did is being responded to.

(Within this context, achievements count as a Reward, b/c people have taken to considering them a part of completion and they're tracked in competitive ways by many platforms. You have to be very careful to NOT reward in these circumstances.)