Every game has good and bad endogenous value attached to its game play. Endogenous value is when an object or action in the game has value to the player, whether the value is good or bad. Some games reward their players better than others. Normally you are able to tell if a game uses endogenous value correctly by how good the game is. The good games are usually the ones that assign rewarding values to their players.
A game that I believe uses endogenous value correctly is the Borderlands series. Borderlands is an adventure role-playing video game where you play as a vault hunter. In the beginning of the game you are helped by multiple other characters that teach you how to play and explain to you the quests and rewards. Eventually you meet Tannis who tells you that the vault you are to be hunting only opens once every 200 years. Then most of the game you are sent on story missions that help you acquire different parts of the vault key. Eventually Tannis is captured by Commander Steele who you follow to the vault, only to learn than the only thing inside the vault is a massive tentacle monster that you battle to rescue Tannis, and the game ends.
I picked Borderlands, because besides the main story you are able to go on separate side quests that reward you with money, experience points, guns, or other important items. These side quests are actually very important to you being able to beat the story missions, because of what they can reward you with. The developers of Borderlands seem to have used endogenous value really well in this game. Besides the good endogenous value in the game, they also incorporate bad endogenous value, but in a good way. If you die at any point in the game, they will take certain amounts of money away from you. Money is very important to characters because you can use money to buy health, guns, ammo, shields, and more. This gives you an incentive not to just run straight into battle and not care if you die or not. It requires you to sometimes be more strategic with your actions.
Game designers do not always incorporate a good risk to reward ratio into their endogenous value. Bad use of endogenous value is when there is a quest that the character can go on and complete, but the reward of that quest is not worth the hassle of going out of your way to complete it. I believe a game that, although is arguably one of the best first person shooters ever, does not use endogenous value correctly is Call of Duty 4.
Although the campaign of Call of Duty 4 is very fun, the side quest to collect the enemy intel and the campaign its self does not have good or bad enough endogenous value. To collect all thirty of the enemy intel items, which appear as laptops, you must go out of your way in the campaign and take up time to explore and look in a bunch of random little rooms to find them. If you are able to find all of them and wasted enough time to do so, you are not rewarded with a lot. You are rewarded with two achievements for the Xbox that do not give you any experience or anything that would help you with the game its self. Since these achievements only give you points toward your Xbox 360 gamer tag score and do not help you beat the game or give you anything to help you beat the game, I believe this quest is a good example of bad usage of endogenous value.
Now if you die during the campaign all that happens is you are sent back to the last save point. Which I believe is not enough bad endogenous value to stop players from going into the game and just trying to Rambo every level. Besides having to back track a little to the last checkpoint, dying does not take anything important away from you like Borderlands does with the money. The game should try and force you to be more strategic with your fighting tactics like you would in real life war where you are only given one life, compared to Call of Duty 4 where you are given an infinite number of lives to try and complete the level. I believe that to fix this problem there should only be a certain number of lives given to the player each level forcing them to be more strategic. If they choose to still play like Rambo and lose all of their lives they are sent not to the last checkpoint, but to the beginning of the level. However, if you complete the level with lives left, you should be rewarded with extra experience points, weapons, or any kind of reward multiplied by the number of lives you have left.