This article has a lot to say about how motivation approaches in organizations are developed and why they so often fail. Some commenters below have attributed the results to bad programming. My guess is the programming was just fine but the programmers made some wrong assumptions about what would "motivate" the wolves. Similar wrong assumptions are made by managers every day and their "algorithms" get the same results. Except, in those cases, it's not the crappy algorithms that are blamed, it's the "wolves" that the managers were trying to motivate. It's hard to imagine a programmer saying, "We rewarded the wolves for catching sheep and rewarded them for doing it quickly but those stupid, lazy, ungrateful wolves didn't catch sheep like we wanted them to." But managers say just this sort of thing all the time.