>>209If you refer to incremental/idle games,like Cookie Clicker, they're actually illustrative of the related concept("Zero-effort reward") but not exactly the point. The concept of effort generating reward can be applied to any genre and any game. Basically you mod the game to be really hard at start and reward player effort by reducing difficulty instead of raising the bar with each level - mostly by removing obstacles that exist at start and reducing effort required to play.
An example that best illustrates this is a Fireball skill. In conventional RPG a Fireball increase in power each spell level at cost of more mana consumed: with "effort generating reward" the Spell mana cost isn't changed but reward(increased damage) applies: in effect, you only get reward vs mana penalty.