Anatomy of an Achievement 157
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."
Re:Achievements really have come a long way (Score:3, Informative)
I have the Orange Box and although a handful of the HL2 and Portal achievements are those dumbass plot achievements, many of them, and all of the TF2 ones, actually require work or luck.
Like "Targetted Advertising" for nailing an enemy to a billboard.
Or the "remove all cameras" in Portal.
Since TF2 doesn't have a plot, the only really bad achievements are the noob ones like "play on all the stock maps" or "get 1000 kills" or "light 100 people on fire with flares", but you still earn them, and the game doesn't guide you right to them.
Re:Geometry Wars 2 did it best (Score:4, Informative)
A small game that neatly showcases what is wrong about achievements...
http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/achievement-unlocked [kongregate.com]
It's all about achievements. You get them for moving left, for moving right, for clicking the mouse, for viewing the credits screen, for dying in the game... you get the clue. Play and see.
Dunno if it's really OCD (Score:3, Informative)
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.