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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."
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.
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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!
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/. 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.
I... sort of like achievements. I try not to get obsessive over them, and generally think that I succeed. However, I do wonder whether there's a bit of a slippery-slope effect. I don't have the largest Xbox Live friends list - just a few people I know in real-life - but it's hard not to get a bit competititve. Given that I tend to only give most games a single playthrough, there's a great temptation to be moderately completionist on the first playthrough, just so you don't miss any low-effort achievements. This does mean I tend to use walkthroughs more than I used to. It also means that as an owner of a 360 and a PS3, if there's a cross-platform game and both versions are functionally identical, I'll plump for the 360 version. Yes, the PS3 has trophies now, but they don't all add together into a single big, clearly visible score.
The weird thing is that I recently went back and played a PS2 RPG that had been sat on my shelf for about 18 months without being touched. At first, the lack of an achievements system felt irritating, but the further I played into it, the more liberating I found it to be able to just sit back and enjoy the game without worrying about chasing down achievements.
So yeah, on balance, they're kind of a mixed blessing from my point of view.
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.
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".