The Achievement Culture
We gamers are living and gaming in an achievement culture. It is now all important and vital to try and achieve as many of these as possible not only to show our gaming prowess but to give a numerical justification to how great our gaming skill truly is. It is as simple as comparing one list of achievements against another, whoever is longer or has the more challenging one to obtain in their list is obviously the more superior gamer and I am sick of it.
The achievement culture really probably started well before the 360 made it much more mainstream, by providing a built in system that all games must have and which can be considered to easily authenticate any achievement a gamer has done. It isn’t until achievements we’re made mainstream did all the problems arise. The PS3 is moving towards achievements, trophies they are calling it which will come under a part of ‘Home’ (AKA Second Life) when the bloody thing actually gets released.
Even PC games are moving towards achievements, just look at Valve and the unequivocal Team Fortress 2. Recently they released a major update, which included the medic achievement pack. 36 new achievements to try and strive for, to prove the length of your gamer skill. This is just for ONE OF NINE classes in the game, so by the end of this, we can look forward to 324 additional achievements added on to the already existing ones!!!
Maps are being produced for TF2 with focus on actually getting the achievements, where you can basically cheat the system and get them all in a relatively short period of time. But wait, isn’t this missing the whole point of actually having achievements in games? Isn’t the idea of them to bring a new challenge to the game, to keep people playing them? A cheap trick used by developers to artificially increase the lifespan of a game? Jump into a server and you may get asked by some ‘cool guys’ to help them get the achievements, so they look like they have the ‘m4d sk1llz’ and can show off to all their ‘friends.’ What is even worse about the TF2 achievements is that you actually need to get them in order to have full access to all the different weapons. So by not actually trying to get these achievements, I am actually missing out on parts of the game?
Well, perhaps I am being a little harsh on achievements, I have to admit they are a lot of fun trying to get some of them and there are some good ideas out there that can really change how you need to play the game. (The Medic achievement pack has led to a sudden jump in the number of people playing as the medic class). The idea of having parts of a game locked until something has been achieved has always been used and is actually a good idea to get people playing the game.
Perhaps what is really getting to me is the sudden influx of people that MUST get all the achievements, they NEED to get them all and that they are willing to do anything to get them. Be it cheating or bribing other players (help me get my achievements, I’ll help you get yours), they will try hard to get them all. Why is it that we as a cultural unit have moved in this direction? What happened to the days where it was skill that dictated how good of a gamer you truly we’re, not an arbitrary number tacked on by your user name?
Chronicler said,
May 13, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Can we have examples of “good” achievements, please? =)
It seems that in the later paragraphs, you’re criticising the concept of having benchmarks to reach to unlock other parts of the games. Slowly unlocking parts of a game is as old as the hills, and adds a sense of ‘progression’ to the game as your weapons get slowly better or you get access to better items. I like it.
But I agree with you that the 360 has turned gaming into one global dicksize competition (with no accounting for limits on free time or funds to buy new games).
Chronicler said,
May 13, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Also, I just need to throw this in, because you do this in almost every post:
“we’re” == “we are” (as in, “we’re happy”)
“were” == past participle of “are” (as in, “we were good gamers before the Xbox”)
Rokusho said,
May 16, 2008 at 10:19 am
Yeah, well my spelling and grammar sucks and I dislike reading what I write more than once, so there is guaranteed to be at least some spelling mistakes, if not more.
I don’t want to be seen as critical of unlocking parts of a game through playing it. However this concept is as old as gaming itself and it can be especially annoying when you need to play through the single player campaign to get access to stuff for multiplayer.