Slashdot Mirror
Anatomy of an Achievement
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."
I like achievements.
BING! "You liked achievements." 100 GS
No, but seriously, I don't farm them, I don't obsess, but I like seeing a sense of purpose when idling the time away in a game. It's nice to see "what left you have to accomplish". Although I despise when "accomplish" is equated to "spent days idling in a corner killing any random zombies the AI decided to throw my way to keep me on my toes". Screw that.
I find achievements the most interesting to hunt when they're asking you to play a game in a new way or try out new and/or interesting things. Geometry Wars 2 had some very interesting achievements, like the ever so hard "Wax on/wax off" where you need to touch every inch of the four walls twice without dying. Like TFA says it's a nice motivator to explore the games or to add replayability ("Pacifist": Mirror's Edge without shooting a gun). The other side of the coin is of course the ones giving you "achievements" for nothing. There are games giving you "achievements" basically for starting the game. Guitar Hero: World Tour really takes away the prestige involved in getting those achievements: playing the tutorial, completing a song, perform as a drummer/vocalist/guitarist, download a few songs, complete an online match (win or lose). Achievements could hardly get less interesting.
/. jokingly added achievements during an April fools joke, but really added a full fledged system. World of Warcraft added achievements in their second expansion to the game. Playstation 3 has its trophies, and the XBox 360 has their achievement system too. People love getting rewarded for doing challenging or quirky, fun mini-games. Some people may dislike achievements, but I think they have really come a long way.
One of the first major introductions of mainstream achievements happened with the Xbox 360. For the release titles the developers didn't really know what to do with the achievements, so they were all pretty generic and often gave more points than they would if they were rolled out today.
Flash forward to today's new releases and you get achievements that truly encourage players to try all aspects of the game, and reward them for it. Some people may find it silly to seek out achievements, but many of us gamers do enjoy the excitement of unlocking that really-hard-to-get achievement.
An xbox.com feature wouldn't mention this, but the Achievements system was systematically developed to appeal to one's higher psychological needs (esteem needs), and it gets obvious when you look at a few features:
Achievements are basically trophies that (supposedly) represent positive accomplishments, which fulfills our need to have meaningful accomplishments and triumphs in our life. You can browse other people's Achievements, so it gives the same feeling as a boast of "look what I did!" even if noone looks at your trophycase.
GamerScore is directly related to this, and is most comparable to money. You get it via any number of Achievements, and just like people boast about their income, players can boast about their GamerScore. GamerScore is prominently displayed on one's profile, so competitive types try to make it higher than anyone else's, presumably for 'prestige'. Of course it can't be spent so it has no intrinsic value.
Leaderboards are like GamerScore in that it allows for ranking one person as being 'better than' another, but it's for a specific game. The vast majority of people are unlikely to be thrilled that they're 2,000th on the leaderboards, though, so it's kept more for tradition than because it's intended to mesh with the other two systems.
Each game only doles out a maximum of so much GamerScore and Achievements, so if you want more then you'll need to rent/buy more games. Xbox Live Indie Games aren't allowed to award any GamerScore or Achievements, and some pro gamers have admitted to passing over them for that reason alone.
And yes, I know RPGs do basically the same thing. Notice that upgrade/leveling mechanics are working their way into EVERY genre nowadays? Makes one wonder about the esteem of hardcore gamers.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Well, I can think of several ways that achievements irritated me before. Well, not achievements as such, but the potential to be use as what they aren't, and the propensity of the clueless puppies to do so.
1. The first one was waay back around the time Oblivion was launched. I remember reading on Slashdot some PHB expounding how he caught on that a tele-commuting worker wasn't actually working at home: he had 5 achievement points in Oblivion in one week! For whoever hasn't actually played Oblivion, getting your first 5 achievements was trivial. You just needed to complete the tutorial sewer for the first one, and after that even doing some trivial quests to join the guilds would give you more. Getting 5 points was something that could be done in an hour if you knew what you're doing, and in a couple of hours tops even by accident if you didn't actively avoid doing quests. In a whole week, as in 7 days, even half an hour of playing a day was something that would get you there and then some.
So in effect what that PHB was saying is that an employee totally was untrustworthy and a loafer because in a whole fucking week he actually had played a couple of hours too. At home, mind you. I guess ass opposed to putting in 7x16 hours for work, like a proper slave on the plantation should. Or is reserving 8 hours for sleep too much too? But more likely he was judging someone based on stuff he didn't understand at all, truly earning himself the achievement "clueless PHB".
2. For that matter the same kind of judging by raw numbers taken in the opposite direction: you're not l33t enough to be in our group if you don't have X achievement points.
3. Achievements which promote anti-social behaviour. E.g., the infamous teabagging achievements. Kiddies trying to outdo each other for acting like a complete asshole, and men at midlife crisis trying to outdo the kiddies to show they still got it, is already a problem in online games as it is. We really _don't_ need even more people doing some insulting thing to a new player, just for wanting the whole set of achievements.
I mean, geesh, what next? An achievement for calling the opposing team's sniper "gay"? An achievement for telling 5 people you fucked their mother _and_ that she's fat and ugly? (That combination always cracks me up. I think some people still don't get that it really says "I'm so desperate I go for old women that I find fat and ugly.";) Because that's what the corpse humping was really supposed to be in the first place: another insult to an opposing player by some insecure kiddie. If we give achievement points for that, why not for the others, once we get parsing natural language good enough to do it reliably?
4. Achievements which are by themselves something antisocial, e.g., by promoting over-farming some resource needed by other players (think for example: the turkey hunter one in WoW, while other people needed those turkeys for the quests,) or killing some quest NPCs, or going against group roles (e.g., yeah, I so want a tank in COH who turns off his protections to get the titles for numbers of hours stunned/held/sleeping/etc or number of deaths), or the like.
Etc.
Basically it seems to me like communism or late-19'th century French military doctrines based on "elan". It's a great idea on paper and at worst harmless on paper, but really it would need a different kind of people to work that way. Both for the players and for the devs and publishers, actually.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Problem with Achievments is that they are poor extension of gameplay.
Sometimes it feels that developers count on achievments to become substantial part of gameplay and driving force behind players instead of gameplay and/or story.
That achievments are used to pad and extend gameplay very cheaply with little benefit to player: 10 hour adition to content can either consist of 10 hours of solid new content or it can consist of 10 hours worth of achievments over existing content (in extreme case, counter that takes 10 hours to max). Guess what is cheaper to develop and hecnes developed.
I mostly comment on this from perspective of ex-MMO player to whom Achievments serve and naked demonstration of grind and pointlessness and where Achievments bring singleplayer way too close to MMO in their gameplay extension structure for my tastes.
Seccond problem is that achievments are poor extension of player drive.
Why do people need excuse to play game they like? Why they, for example, need number of zombies they kill or disco balls they use tracked and presented? Shouldn't doing whatever they do be fun enough for them to continue doing that without being guided by developers?
Guiding players through playthrought is okay, but guiding them through their OCD/Grind is somewhat questionable (same vein of questionable as mmos which are thinly veiled skinners boxes.).
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Simply, Achievments: MMO evil in my Single Player.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
getting the gnome in HL2: Episode 2 into space.
Gahhh! Don't remind me. I carried that stupid gnome all the way to the Ant Lion caves. I had to set it down for just one second to use the gravity gun to smash some grubs... and I hit the wrong button. Instead of gently dropping the gnome at my feet, I launched the little bastard right out into the depths. of course, then I panicked and hit the Quick Save button instead of Quick Load.
:(
...I can still see his cheeky grin as he tumbles end over end into the darkness.
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
No, no, no. That's just the old geezer in you, talking.
This is just the logical outcome of rewarding our snowflakes for each and every inane thing they did when growing up. "You got an 'A'!" Here's your reward! "You got a 'C'!" Here's your reward! "You participated!" Here's your reward! "You lost!" Here's your reward! "You're breathing!" Here's your reward! "You can say, 'potato'!" Here's your reward!