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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.
Do you think you have a piece that's more "news for nerds" than this? Go submit it! Right now!
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Do you think you have a piece that's more "news for nerds" than this? Go submit it! Right now!
that way the submission can stay "black" color-coded and after days and days end up getting rejected, only to have it immediately start out as "green" color-code and posted within 24 hours when submitted by a Slashdot editor three weeks later with a less descriptive summary that probably hasn't even been spellchecked. thanks but no thanks.
He was trying to win the new Slashdot Moron Achievement. Duh.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
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.
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.
Anyone else tired of every god damn company picking up on this lil' pat on the back "hey good job buddy" crap?
I don't need that when I complete a level. Finishing the level IS the reward (and maybe a save point if there's no save anywhere system).
What's wrong with the arcade-ish points system? Oh, you need to reward the most mundane and completely contrary actions in the game? http://www.wowhead.com/achievement=1206
All achievements say to me is that the developers weren't able to properly reward players and, without the achievements, doesn't have an enticing enough carrot on a stick to motivate them.
http://img843.imageshack.us/img843/7033/achievement.jpg
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
/. 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.
Achievement Unlocked
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.
Yeah, I think you're right.
The heat is getting to me and making me grouchy, sorry.
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.
You could also disable every section but the Science section if that's all you want to read about. Complaining about games related articles in the Games section is a bit silly.
which is totally what she said
the beginnings of the most recent universal adoption to the entire industry, across all platforms
"Achievements" have existed for as long as video games have. Originally we started with just one single achievement, which was called a "High Score List". In addition to the formal "high score", there have always been informal achievements shared between friends. For example, initially we would compete for the high score. Then we'd compete for who could do it fastest. Or beat the game using the fewest lives, or collect all the powerups, or find all the secret areas, etc.
"Achievements" are simply a formal, explicit way for gamers to show off their E-Penises, especially since many games have moved away from the model of "Play it, beat it, then you're done".
So ya, no shit they're here to stay, just like they've always been. Even if game companies stop implementing them formally, they will exist amongst the player base regardless. And if you doubt me, try doing a search for "Speed Run Videos", and you'll see a good example of informal "achievements".
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'.
1. Maybe not you personally, but I do know people first hand (as in, IRL) for whom getting all achievements _is_ a major driving factor.
E.g., someone who actually did the same dungeon well over 100 times until a mount dropped, _and_ then forked over real money for the buyable mount, so he can get the 100 mounts achievement in WoW. Roll that around in your head. He didn't just put countless hours into a repetitive grind where even any other rewards than that elusive drop weren't worth anything, but actually paid RL money. I mean, geesh.
E.g., I've heard it from two different people I know IRL that they normally wouldn't have even considered teabagging someone in a multiplayer game, but they just had to have all achievements, including that one.
I would assume that a major difference is that you're talking about single-player games, while these were multiplayer. The idea that everyone on the same server can see (and in some people's imagination even envy) your having the highest achievement score or are riding the vanity mount unlocked by some such grind, seems to be a powerful motivation.
2. I don't think I'd even blame it on just OCD, as in, the condition described in the DSM as opposed to a cheap reuse as a pejorative term.
There are games where you can get actual bonuses for doing the right set of achievements. E.g., in COH/COV, you can get stuff as powerful as +10% health, or +5% health _and_ endurance (mana) regen, or even extra powers (spells), for doing the right set of achievements. The problem is that the COH/COV achievements can be as arbitrary as needing to take 1 million points of damage (so now you have the healer charging in melee because otherwise he'll never get that stuff) or spending a total 100 hours mezzed/stunned/etc (so now you see tanks turning off their mez protection toggle for that) or dying 1000 times, or clicking the right plaques out of the hundreds scattered all over the place, or killing 10000 rikti monkeys, or selling 1000 recipes at the auction house, and so on.
And if the numbers sound like BS hyperbole, they aren't. COH actually has an exponential scale for achievements and the numbers can get insane fast. There are achievements for literally 10,000 hours doing something or another. Do the maths. And yes, before it got toned down, it literally required one to kill that many monkeys for one achievement.
And, really, I'll side with the GP there. Dangling a carrot in front of the players to make them do something for that long is stupid. At best it's something they would do anyway (e.g., the tank taking damage), but at worse it's something they should actually be avoiding (e.g., the healer getting enough aggro to take that much damage), and at worst it's something they hate but will grind through for an insane number of hours just for that reward.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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.
Achievements really were the "killer app" of the Xbox 360. It's the one innovative thing Microsoft brought to the table that absolutely everyone is now copying (except for Nintendo, I guess), just like Nintendo brought motion controls to the forefront.
I personally think achievements will have a greater long-term impact on gaming than motion controls.
The first time I remember actually caring about the XBOX Achievement system was when a friend of mine started claiming he owned me at Halo 3 because he was 80% completed with his achievements for the game. I had never really paid much attention to it but I started looking into it and saw a whole other game. I successfully got 100% of the achievements ( until they added more) and moved on to CODMW, CODMW2, and many others, but it added a sense of continuation for the game once the campaign was over which prolonged the enjoyment of the game. Now I check the achievements out before starting the game to see the game within the game. Totally worth it in my book.