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Anatomy of an Achievement

Posted by Soulskill on from the you-don't-get-an-achievement-for-commenting-on-this-one dept.

Whether they annoy you or fulfill your nerdy collection habit, achievements have spread across the gaming landscape and are here to stay. The Xbox Engineering blog recently posted a glimpse into the creation of the Xbox 360 achievement system, discussing how achievements work at a software level, and even showing a brief snippet of code. They also mention some of the decisions they struggled with while creating them: "We are proud of the consistency you find across all games. You have one friends list, every game supports voice chat, etc. But we also like to give game designers room to come up with new and interesting ways to entertain. That trade-off was at the heart of the original decision we made to not give any indication that a new achievement had been awarded. Some people argued that gamers wouldn't want toast popping up in the heat of battle and that game designers would want to use their own visual style to present achievements. Others argued for consistency and for reducing the work required of game developers. In the end we added the notification popup and its happy beep, which turned out to be the right decision, but for a long time it was anything but obvious."

8 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Re:News by gravos · · Score: 4, Funny

    He was trying to win the new Slashdot Moron Achievement. Duh.

    --
    This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
  2. Re:News by Redlazer · · Score: 2, Funny
    Yeah, how dare they talk about gaming!

    Huge numbers of people find it really interesting, and there's no way nerds would want to know about the beginnings of the most recent universal adoption to the entire industry, across all platforms?

    And get off my lawn!

    --
    Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
  3. Re:News by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/7033/achievement.jpg

  4. Whew! All that works saved! by ArcadeNut · · Score: 3, Funny

    I was about to implement my own Achievement system until I saw the code Snippet! That's going to save me a lot of work!

    --
    Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
  5. Re:No, they need to die by BenevolentP · · Score: 5, Funny
    Im not sure how achievements can actually irritate someone - can't you just ignore them? The only thing I could think of is that it disturbs your immersion in the game a little when it pops up, though it never bothered me.

    There are many things going for achievements, even if you don't care (or track) how high your total is.
    • They are often funny and self-referential ("press start to play" achievement for 5g in the simpsons game comes to mind).
    • They're great for people who like to grind or just like the gameplay of a specific game and need an excuse to play it even after they've played it to death.
    • I feel silly making a list of pros of that unimportant a thing, but i wanted to complete the 3 point list for the "Defended XBOX achievements on slashdot using a 3 point list" achievement.
  6. Re:No, they need to die by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    A false sense of achievement..

  7. Re:Here's how by BenevolentP · · Score: 3, Funny

    An achievement for telling 5 people you fucked their mother[...]

    An achievement for calling the opposing team's sniper "gay"?

    Actually, it'd be cool if the insulted player got the achievements ("1000 fathers", "well dressed").

  8. Re:News by infolation · · Score: 2, Funny

    Don't back down so easily!

    The first principle of news-ish nerd-ish moronicity is 'stand by your beliefs, no matter how wrong-headed, in the face of adversity, critisism, flaming, facts, or the law'.