Editor’s note: Much has been written and said about achievements, but I don’t think anyone has captured what makes achievements both great and horrible quite like Luke does here. And if someone has, I’m pretty sure they used less jokes. -Demian
Achievements: the best exploitation of gamer psychology since the Dead or Alive guys* said, “What if we gave them all gigantic racks?” Combating the problem of playing games and wondering “am I achieving anything?” by programming said game to say “you totally are!” — that’s the best self-solving problem until someone invents slimming pizza.
*This isn’t a general assumption that all game developers are men, this is a specific statement that if any woman was involved in making DoA, she’s a renegade from a rogue feminist organisation hiding in the last place her colleagues would look.
They’ve taken over gaming worlds the way infinite armies of Nazi zombie cyborg terrorists couldn’t, and exert greater control over some players than showering.
Three Kentucky students rendered themselves entirely irrelevant by building a self-playing-station to gather an impossible million roses on We Love Katamari, and when your greatest achievement is “no longer even has to play games,” you become so useless you actually evaporate.
You waft off to join unicorn harnesses and non-alcoholic beer under a stack of Dora the Explorer strategy guides in the Room of Pointlessness.
Games use achievements as tutorials, as badges of level completion, and as motivation to try out different things (though if you need a points reward to try out the different weapons in a “shoot the enemies with your weapons” game there’s something wrong with you).
Every gaming writer in the world has weighed in on achievements, but not one has got the real idea: they’re Awesomeness Multipliers. They take something that’s already utterly awesome and then agree with you about it.
Chainsawed something the size of a bank’s head office? Murdered 20 machine-gunners with a knife? Backflipped off a ramp, headshotting three people before you land in way that would make Ghandi cheer? You’re on your own going “holy shit that was cool!” and DING!
The computer agrees with you! It provides you with independent verification via a disinterested party that yes, you just kicked electronic ass, and that was cool.
Some say that achievements are pointless (which is rich, coming from an army of identical lone heroes taking on a million parallel versions of the same alien horde). I say they’re not just fun, they save relationships.
I once shot an invisible enemy in the head from two miles away, and that’s the sort of shit you NEED to share. My friends weren’t around or even online, and my lovely lady had previously made it clear that if I talked about game stuff she would talk about Sex and the City. To this day I credit the DING of the Steam achievement “Shoot The Breeze” with shutting me up and saving our relationship.
It’s an electronic high five when you need it most, and if Nintendo had built R.O.B to do that instead of the stupid shit with the gyros he’d still be around today. He’d be more popular than Mario.
Achievemensts multiply how much fun you’re having — doing something regular, the DING is a little boost. The more outlandish, impossible, or insane the achievements, the better you feel!
Achievement hunters counter that earning the almost unachievable, impossible goals aren’t fun, to which I reply: They’re still multipliers. Good achievements aren’t little check boxes on a list that says, “Do all this, then you can clock off this game.” They’re records of your victories over the Laws of Physics and Possibility.
Conversly, if you’ve turned your own games into work, then that tedious, five-hour achievement you finally unlocked just maginifies your problem — something that isn’t fun anymore is now an actual chore, and a parody of how you’ve turned games into unpaid labor that’d make Don Quixote nudge Pancho and say, “Look at that time-wasting loser.”
So give up the impossible achievements, the never-ever-going-to-happens, so that I can happen the hell out of them, and know that when gamerscorers complain you’re only annoying those who deserve it.