It's curious that this sort of game design is exactly the sort that's getting railed against in the progressive game design community. Fellows like Jonathan Blo

It's curious that this sort of game design is exactly the sort that's getting railed against in the progressive game design community. Fellows like Jonathan Blow and Jason Rohrer argue quite convincingly that games' focusing on artificial rewards are merely masking the lack of meaning that modern games have to offer. The face that this solution works as well as it does suggests that there's not much meaning to the email overload we see today. That means there might exist a better solution to this problem, something that encourages meaningful interaction in the place of overloading responses. But this is an interesting stopgap solution in a lot of ways.