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The Best Achievements
Like them or not, achievements have become a staple of modern gaming, giving players goals to strive for and a measuring stick with which they can compare themselves to random strangers on the internet. Eurogamer discusses why they've become so popular, and takes a look at some of the most entertaining examples. Quoting:
"... we mock Achievement points because they spell out in large numbers what is so pathetic about video games. But we also celebrate them, because, when used in funny, creative or interesting ways, they also spell out what is so compelling and wonderful about video games. Because for every Achievement in which you have to do nothing more than play through a tutorial there's another that subverts convention, rewarding you for skipping it instead. For every fetch quest that has you collecting dogtags for the millionth time, there's another that makes you fight the baddy with your arms tied behind your back. And for every Achievement you earn in jest for pressing the start button, there's another that only rewards the single best player in the world."
With a grand total of 311,673 gamerpoints, Xbox Live User Stallion83 has won more in-game achievements than any other player. Indeed, he's earned the full 1000 gamerpoints for no less than 204 of the 437 games he's played on his Xbox 360, a Herculean accomplishment of time, effort and, in a great many cases, skill. And yet, as the URL of his website, www.1milliongamerscore.com makes perfectly clear, Stallion83's quest for numerical glory is not even halfway done.
People love recognition. And you're making this published online? Finally, something you can look at at the end of a day spent gaming and feel some sort of achievement (no matter how small).
Hats off to you, Stallion83. I somehow envy and pity you at the same time.
Hell, I myself am guilty of this on the very site we are communicating on (reminds me, need to go moderate to keep that running total).
Brilliant move on Microsoft's part (can I say that here?). Certainly not original but ingenious to add an additional level of addiction.
My work here is dung.
Great fun to watch and to do. Although these usuall aren't "official achievements", as they tend to exploit the game in some way or another.
A good classic example: Super Metroid
If each mistake being made is a new one, then progress is being made.
Which is why this is the greatest game of all time
http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked
Sony really got Skill Points/Trophies/Achievements right with the PS3.
The Bronze/Silver/Gold/Platinum breakdown lets you look at another gamer's profile and almost immediately get a sense of just what type of gamer they are.
With Trophies you get:
* Obviously what games they play
* What games they like the most and put the most time into
* What type of gamer they are - lots of just Bronze Trophies and they like to buy games and not complete them, lots of Silver and Gold Trophies and they are a serious gamer who completes games and gets lots of the side quests and hard parts of games done, Platinums and you know you've looking at a hardcore gamer
And like Skill Points, Sony has talked about your Trophy level unlocking things inside of Home in the future.
No, you're the one who doesn't grasp the concept.
The idea is to have EVERY game have tons of little achievements. People find them, accidentally, and then find themselves wanting to complete the set. It keeps them playing past the point where they might have otherwise stopped.
Having more people playing your games improves your mind share, and attracts more developers. And it costs MS not one cent. They are giving away absolutely nothing, but because it's a limited amount of nothing, and you need to work to get that nothing, people eat it up.
It's been a tremendous success, to the point that other companies are now mimicking it. Sony Skill Points? Who's ever heard of those?
Old arcade games had points. Your goal was to get on the high score list, so everyone could see how good you were. You weren't meant to actually win games. Heck, if you get too far in Pac-Man, it crashes.
When console gaming got big, people didn't care too much about points. It wasn't as fun -- nobody was there to see it. So points went out of fashion, and the goal was instead to win. Super Mario 3 for NES had points, but who cared? It was beatable, and we wanted to win.
Now that consoles are networked, gamers can have public recognition again. And back to points we go...
Actually Sony didn't come up with it first either, Activision, Imagic, Atari were doing this sort of thing back in the 80's Albeit with "real awards" of physical item such as T-Shirts (Imagic, Atari),patchs and pins (Activision) as well as Baseball caps. (all 3 did this from time to time.)
just google it and see for yourself.
R.Morton
modded quote "what's that he's talking about? Windows , Never had a problem with Windows till I tried to use it."
Sort of, but not everyone, or not in the same way. For example, as early as the first online games (MUDs), Bartle wrote his classic paper in which he distinguished the following kinds of players and their interactions with the game and with each other:
- achievers, who love achieving stuff. They want to have the biggest score, the most virtual money, have the full top-tier equipment set, etc
- explorers, who are mostly interested interested in reverse engineering your game. They want to discover places, or to reverse engineer how your game works, or whatever other intellectual pursuits. Many actually don't care much about material achievements or titles, except in as much as they're needed to explore. Their "achievements" are all about knowledge gained, not stuff you could hang on the wall or sum up in points.
- socializers, who are pretty much just using your game as a chat room which incidentally happens to also have a game on the side. These people are there to make friends, organize some guild party, stuff like that. And chat lots. Although you could point out that these are their own kind of achievements, they're also not the kind that's easy to automatically measure and slap a title on.
- "killers", named so because their greatest reward is driving someone off the game, effectively perma-killing them off. They're the kind who'll try to harrass, annoy, give you grief, etc. Or what the rest of the world calls "griefers" or "trolls". Their favourite prey are the ones who take unwarranted hostility personally, i.e., the socializers. Although the "killers" title can be confusing, don't confuse them with PvP-ers. A lot of PvP-ers are actually just achievers (e.g., for the honour points), and a lot of killers actually are more creative with their harrassment than camping your corpse all day.
Anyway, again, it's the kind of thing which is hard to measure in achievements. And most killers don't care much about their character (including equipment, titles, etc) as such anyway, it's just a harrassment tool. Think of all the guys who didn't even bother getting another armour than the death shroud in UO, for example. Their achievement wasn't having the best looking outfit, but the fact that they could gank you repeatedly when you went mining. A lot bought disposable accounts who will get banned, but hopefully serve their purpose as harrassment tools in the meantime. What makes anyone think that on such a disposable account any titles achieved on a character matter at all?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
sorry to double post just wanted to throw a link in here related to my above post.
http://www.atariage.com/2600/archives/activision_patches.html
modded quote "what's that he's talking about? Windows , Never had a problem with Windows till I tried to use it."
Um, hate to break this to you. I have never heard anyone talk about Platinum Trophies either. I have a feeling that hardcore MS gamers talk about gamerscore and hardcore Sony gamers talk about platinum trophies. The rest of the us just play games to have fun and aren't involved in the stupid fanboy crap.
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