Achievement Unlocked: The Addiction Factor

At the time of writing my Gamerscore is at a rather respectable 9963. I’m one achievement away from reaching 10,000. Just one more level on Call of Duty 4’s veteran difficulty and I’ll be right up there, those five digits available for everyone to see in all their glory. I’ll have entered the upper echelons of the gaming hierarchy, one of the elite, a king amongst men.

Or not. I’ll still be the same gamer I was before, I won’t move up in any ranking system, I’m not going to get paid, I won’t get a better quality of life. Hell, I’m not even going to be able to trade them in for dashboard themes or gamer pics. The only real end result is the dawning realization that I’ve played what probably amounts to far too many games.

So why do I, and many gamers like me, look forward to that next blip? The one accompanied with a short message letting me know what I’ve managed to do and assigning it a numerical value. What is it about this small implementation that arouses not only a sense of pleasure when we attain it, but also ire and fondness in equal parts within the gaming community at large? Most gamers fall into one of two camps; those who see achievements as one of the generation’s greatest innovations, a design choice that opens up a whole new way of playing games, and those who see achievements as a cheap way to entice greedy gamers to pay for titles simply to obtain what, really, amounts to an entirely arbitrary score.

Achievements and the accompanying Gamerscore have created a kind of Jekyll and Hyde monster. On the surface they are a brilliant addition to gaming culture. Achievements are the natural extension of the videogame standard of challenging players to set themselves targets; they encourage you to squeeze every last drop of joy out of each game you own. However, like most things, they are abused. Just as you have cheaters in gambling, drugs in athletics, and Colin Farrell in films, there are less than savory people that don’t see their Gamerscore as an expansion of fun but rather as some measure of their all-encompassing magnitude.

Let’s start with the ‘Achievement Whores’. These are the guys that are going to go out and buy a copy of King Kong or CSI: Hard Evidence simply to rake in some easy points even if it means playing a game that is hardly worth the time, money, or general acknowledgment. I actually know a guy who does this kind of thing, and it’s completely…well, ridiculous. Games are about having fun, and playing through any game only to get the achievements (and by extension increase your Gamerscore) is at complete odds with that value. It’s exactly the kind of thing that tarnishes achievements as a great feature, and is exacerbated by ‘The Boasters’, the gamers out there who for some reason completely beyond the grasp of normal human comprehension use their Gamerscore in a wall pissing match of sorts, in which there are no winners only mildly imbecilic losers who, if they had more than two brain cells, would see that they should willingly remove themselves from the gene pool. You’re not going to get any respect from fellow gamers just because you got 1000/1000 on Transformers: The Game.

Then there’s those guys and gals who go one step further and actually cheat for that oh-so-important high score. They’ll do anything to get their hands on every last little point made available by developers. Amongst other nefarious techniques cheaters have been known to manipulate software, swap game saves, play two different regions of the same title, trade their achievements and so forth. A site even popped up once offering 360 owners the service of playing their games for them, providing they were willing to hand over some of their hard earned cash for the labour. If the number one reason for sitting down and whiling away a Sunday afternoon is playing games for the enjoyment of it, then achievements have provided some of the impetus to turn this concept on its head by creating a gaming landscape where people actually pay others to have their fun for them.

Not completely irreproachable for many a gamer’s acrimony toward the Gamerscore are the developers themselves. Some of the absolutely pointless achievements developers see fit to throw carelessly into their own games give off the impression of having been put there solely for the sake of it. Getting 40G for completing training missions in Splinter Cell: Double Agent, or 20G for just hosting online matches on GRAW or Gears of War certainly doesn’t broaden the gameplay or develop the story arc. They might as well just give the points out for free. Or for pressing pause. Or for just putting the game into the disc tray. Even worse, some developers go absolutely mental and give achievements with no points attached to them, like X-Men: The Official Game. Why even bother doling out the achievement in the first place?

More insidious achievements come in the likes of Madden NFL ‘07, from which you can add 10G to your score for importing a draft class. Meaning, of course, you’ll have to have also purchased the matching EA college football game. A sinister marketing ploy to say the least.

Then there are those that ask far too much of the player. Achievements should be entertaining and challenging, not demanding and arduous. Take, for example, GRAW. Play online for just a meagre 8 hours and you’ll get a whole 28 points to your name. Maybe along the way you’ll even reach number one in the Xbox Live leaderboards. For that you’ll get 40G. For being number one in the world. 40 points. Jeez, couldn’t have just thrown a few more in there could ya? This is nothing compared to the absurd levels of unfeasibility Bomberman: Act Zero manages. 50G for planting 1,000,000 bombs. It may sound like an interesting challenge, but when you do the maths you find that even if the game had no load times or breaks, and you were able to plant one bomb every second, uninterrupted and without ammo limits, it would still take you 11 days, 13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds of non-stop play to get the achievement. You may as well just take the whole notion of fun and throw it directly out the nearest window. Similarly, Final Fantasy XI will happily confer 30G for each character you get to level 75, the highest level possible. From one account it took a hardcore FFXI player approximately 700 hours of playtime to get just one character to level 62. Who, on God’s green earth, is going to get all 18 classes to that level? I don’t even want to think about it. If you have this achievement, well done, you obviously worked hard for it. You should probably get out more though.

Achievements really are changing the way many people play games, altering the focus from the simple act of having fun towards something much more restrictive and laborious. Are achievements really sucking the soul of the gamer, blurring the reasons why they first fell in love with games in the first place? Maybe games should be left as they are. After all, videogames ought to be crafted to have enough intrinsic reward by themselves; is a secondary external reward system truly required?

Well, maybe not. But you know what? I like them. That’s right; despite all the crappy abuse, the naysayers, or developer’s casual addition of any old tripe into their games to make up that 1000G, I think it’s a good system. For every bad achievement out there, there’s another that’s just calling out to be attained, another challenge that you have to finish before you feel ready to put the game back on the shelf. Achievements, with a little forethought and imagination, can be downright fun. Who’s to argue with something that can not only extend a game’s replayability but also create new personal goals within the context of a larger game? There are those that encourage team play, experimentation, creativity, exploration, the focal point being entertainment rather than boosting your score. For example PGR4 asks players to get two bikes facing each other performing an impressive endo, or have eight cars in the air at the same time. It’s a gentle way of persuading gamers to get together and enjoy the experience in a group. Moreover, rather than just hand out achievements for progressing PGR4 awards such achievements as ‘3CZV657′, in which you have to ride a Delorean during a thunderstorm and reach 80mph just as lightning strikes. It’s clear that a little humour and ingenuity has been put to good use, two things that everyone wants to see more of in their games. Even if it is coming from the achievements it’s certainly not something to turn your nose up at.

Crackdown is a prime example of how developers should tackle the achievements system. Each achievement is there to nudge the player towards a style of play around which the game is designed. Crackdown is simply a massive playground. Sure, there’s the main story and missions to get on with, but where Crackdown really opens up is in its ability to let the player make their own fun, and tell their own stories within the framework of a larger game. Mow down 175 gang members whilst driving, execute a 6 second jump in a vehicle or achieve a height of 115 feet or more all encourage the player’s interaction with the cars. Body juggler, an achievement designed to test the player’s skill, rewards points for using explosives to keep a body up in the air for more than 10 seconds. Even achievements like finding all the orbs within the city are a lot less mundane than they may seem, as its an achievement that ties in perfectly with the title’s exploration and free running mechanics. It provides a motive to explore the whole city, opening up new areas for your perusal. If the achievements are planned with consideration they can allow players to eke out and discover every last drop of gameplay offered, and therefore experience the full game the developers intended for them.

When done right, achievements can be calculated to expand boundaries and advocate diverse play. I for one would never have put myself through the admittedly masochistic act of fighting through Call of Duty 4 on veteran difficulty without them. Having achievements as you go provides a sort of back slapping, a nice reminder that you worked your way through that journey and came out on the other side with something to show for it. Ok, fair enough. Many gamers don’t need to have such verification for achieving a harder task, but it’s still a nice motivation for those who would barely give such feats a second thought. So what if the score is arbitrary, if it gives you a reason to challenge yourself?

One of the main characteristics of playing videogames is the satisfaction gained upon attaining objectives, be it scoring a goal or destroying an alien hive. Microsoft have focused on this particular aspect and allowed developers to create games within games around it; smaller objectives that you can scrutinize and complete at your leisure. It’s a completist’s dream, a chance to display pride, skill and dedication to their friends. Knowing you are one in a thousand people who have managed an achievement must be an awesome sensation. Boasting would be to entirely miss the point. The focus should be on having done something worthwhile and to share it with your friends in a mature way. There is a huge community aspect behind the idea, whether Microsoft intended it to be that way or not. If it’s working together to gain some points, gauging each other skill, or tracking a friend’s progress on the same game, achievements allow gamer’s to tie their experiences together ever more tightly.

Achievements almost hark back to the ‘High Score’ days of arcade games. They provide a reason to keep playing long after you would normally put the pad down and present another layer of addictiveness and satisfaction on top of that already offered by the game’s core mechanics, thus broadening the entire outlook of any particular title. Is it a gimmick? Maybe. But it is one that encourages play, and gets more gamers playing more games, and this can be nothing but a good thing. Their impact on the competition is already evident, with the PS3’s Home implementing a trophy room in which to display various accomplishments. It all goes to show that only one thing is for sure. For better or for worse, achievements are here to stay.