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As the owner/founder of MyGamerCard, I hope that you're not claiming it's typical or depressing that I run a service that organizes gamers by their GamerScore?

MGC exists primarily to allow people to share their GamerCard (i.e. their gaming history) with friends. In addition, the stats I collect are used to foster competition and for personal tracking. The Leaderboards (which organize gamers by their score) are to incite people to play more and induce curiosity; I do not promote or condone any illegal activity.

Apologies if I'm being overly defensive or reading too much into your quote.. just seems that every six months or so, something comes around about GamerScore, and MGC gets thrown in the middle like it's intentionally trying to cater to idiots.

Well, at MyGamerCard.net, we host the Xbox 360 GamerScore Leaderboard in which you can see that some people are taking more achievements for themselves than others.

50 Achievements is still a lot. As other posters have mentioned, you're not going to get all of them for each game you play. Some require a lot of dedication, and some, like EA's early games, allow you to gain all of the Achievements with minimal work required.

Achievements are definitely popular. They help boost game sales without a doubt. Not necessarily for the better of the community, I'm sure -- I know many people who have sat through some truly horrible games just for the GamerScore, and that just encourages publishers to make more mediocre games.

Well, at MyGamerCard.net, we host the Xbox 360 GamerScore Leaderboard in which you can see that some people are taking more achievements for themselves than others.

50 Achievements is still a lot. As other posters have mentioned, you're not going to get all of them for each game you play. Some require a lot of dedication, and some, like EA's early games, allow you to gain all of the Achievements with minimal work required.

Achievements are definitely popular. They help boost game sales without a doubt. Not necessarily for the better of the community, I'm sure -- I know many people who have sat through some truly horrible games just for the GamerScore, and that just encourages publishers to make more mediocre games.

All Xbox Live Arcade games are required to have 12 achievements worth a total of 200 gamerscore. All retail games are required to have between 5 and 50 achievements, worth a maximum of 1000 gamerscore.

And the issue with "easy gamerscore" was more prevalent near launch, as the concept was still new and not all the developers put effort into creating worthy achievements. The 2K sports games, for example, had ridiculously easy achievements in the 2K6 games - NBA 2K6 and College Hoops 2K6 each had only 5 achievements, and they are easy enough that you can get all 1000 gamerscore in a single game, and a lot of people have borrowed/rented those two because they're so easy. But if you look at the 2K7 titles, there are a lot more achievements, and they're not nearly as easy.

If you check one of the websites dedicated to achievements (such as Achieve360Points.com, you'll see that games have really improved their achievements over time, as most games have a few easy ones that you get early on, a good amount that you get when you really spend time in the game, and then a few that are extremely tough - though the ridiculously tough ones such as getting #1 on the leaderboard have also disappeared lately, because they just result in people gaming the leaderboards to get there instead of actually playing.

And I think it's just as impressive to see the websites that have taken advantage of having your gamer profile visible on the web, such as MyGamerCard.net, and created leaderboards and the like based on the gamerscore.

If the new Xbox Live has shown us anything it's that ANY game can benifit from online features even if it's nothing more then stats or activity tracking. Of course leaderboards can be used by more then just online games. Many of the classic games like Frogger and Pacman use the Leaderboards for that little extra value.

Even being able to see what offline achievements someone has earned it well worth it IMO.

Being "online" is more then just multiplayer.

...few gamers actually finish games to the end, even with story...

Uhoh. Tell that to the pages upon pages of gamers listed on the GamerScore Leaderboard.

Fluffy article or no, they're right. The achievements system is pure genius, because it adds public bragging rights to the concept of 100%'ing a game, and suddenly I'm interested. They've tacked a level grind onto every game out there, and it worked.

I'm totally addicted to 100%'ing the achievements in my games. I've spent hours scouring maps for hidden items so I could claim the elusive "game complete" achievement in Kameo. I routinely start every game on the hardest difficulty level so I can show off to others that I've done it. I spent 3 days with a checklist from GameFAQs finding hidden gaps in Tony Hawk. I played Gun 3 extra times so I could have credit for beating it on every difficulty level.

The system isn't perfect. Some games, like King Kong or give away achievement points like they're candy. I'm more proud of my 25-point "Big Cheese of the South Seas" achievement in Hexic HD than I am of the entire 1000 points credit I have for King Kong. Other games like Quake 4 have achievements that almost nobody will win (be #1 on the worldwide leaderboards). Some games give you a full set of achievements just for beating them. We'll see how things settle out.