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GDC Europe: Achivements - They're A Mixed Bag
by Brandon Sheffield [PC, Console/PC, Exclusive]
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August 18, 2010
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Researcher and Malmoe University associate professor Mikael Jakobsson notes that "there's been a lot of talk recently about how achievements are extrinsic awards systems" -- that is to say that it's something outside of the game, an arbitrary reward that you're given for just about anything, versus the gold stars you get in school for a job well done.
"This to me isn't false exactly, but it's a very small part of the whole picture," he says, in a GDC Europe talk focused on lessons from achievement design and play. "To me, achievements are more like quests. They give you a task to conduct, just like a quest in World of Warcraft for instance," he said. "It gives you something to do, and it also gives you a reward."
"I don't think they're extrinsic, either," he added. "It's just that the achievements aren't necessarily a part of the game you're playing at the moment. They're more part of the Xbox Live MMO game that everyone on Xbox Live is playing at the same time as they're playing the separate titles."
For the purposes of his research, he is just talking about the Xbox 360, and the Xbox Live MMO is pretty much invisible, he says. We only see the achievements, or quests, but there's also your avatar, and gamertag which ties all your achievements to a character. If you think about it as a metagame, then the achievements aren't outside the gaming experience, "they're just part of the other gaming experience."
"A lot of console gamers look down on PC gamers," says Jakobsson. "This is a fact. They especially look down on people who play MMOs. They tend to think people who play MMOs are wasting their lives, and possibly addicted. … But at the same time they happily play this Xbox Live MMO and have a lot of fun with it."
The actual gameplay in this meta MMO isn't that interesting, he says. It's a lot of grinding involved. "Sometimes you need to do some grinding, you need to do some sweating and bleeding to make the reward feel greater," he said, referencing his previous MMO research. The research for this project consisted of listening to hundreds of hours of podcasts, interviewed people, and so forth.
"I think there's a lot of conflict between not wanting to be perceived as liking achievements, but still wanting to get them," he said. "They might even want to hide their feelings and not want to come out as an achievement lover."
In spite of the mixed bag that achievements can represent, he says that "a lot of the success of the Xbox 360 can be attributed to the achievement program."
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In other words, if console players go after achievements/trophies like MMORPG players grind quests, and for similar reasons, then the success of the quest model in MMORPGs suggests that something similar could be applied to console achievements.
The obvious starting point would be the "kill 10 rats" quest: a "collect 10 Achievements" Achievement. A slightly more advanced version could be "collect one Achievement from 10 different games." I'd be surprised if these "quests" didn't already exist.
But there could also be timed quests ("collect 3 Achievements in one real-time hour"), genre quests ("collect 1 Achievement from 3 different science fiction games"), skill quests ("collect the Sniper Achievement in 3 different games"), and even group quests ("collect any Achievement also collected by 10 of the people in your friends list").
I'll leave the equivalents of escort quests and Fedex quests open for others to figure out. ;)
One other notion: all the above is what the console metagame could take from MMORPGs. Is there anything that MMORPGs could learn from console metagames?
What I do, is that several hard to do actions (of varying difficulties) reward the player.
Later he can see a list of all those actions (the ones he already did, the ones that he did not are "secret"), and he can do them again, for the same rewards again...
But I think I can only do that because my game is arcade-ish, where you can replay it several times, and the aim is higher scoring, a story based game makes no sense to offer this.. (maybe with a few exceptions)
However, my opinion would likely change if there was a loyalty program associated with them. If my level on PSN actually netted me real world goods, or even something like a free Plus membership, I might actually care.
Until such time that the number actually means something though, I would honestly just like to disable them.
"You've unlocked an achievement - You knifed 10 d00ds"
"You've unlocked an achievement - Unlock 10 Achievements in KnifeD00ds2011"
"You've unlocked an achievement - Unlocked over 3000 unique achievements"
"You've unlocked an achievement - ROUND NUMBER - Exactly 10,000 Gamer Points!"
"You've unlocked an achievement - Three ROUND NUMBER Achievements!"
"You've unlocked an achievement - MASOCHIST - You're still playing our games!"
"You've unlocked an achievement - PERFECT NUMBER SEVEN - seven notifications in a row. We hope you could still read the subtitles...."
I think that Limbo's achievements have come the closest to putting tiny "word puzzles" into the name & description of each achievement, which were rather successful in making me feel extremely smug and clever about myself. Although I think that the egg collecting is in direct conflict with the meaning of the gameplay, setting, and world, the cleverness of the system made me curious enough to at check it out (and see it through in under an hour). I still wish it wasn't an egg hunt, but I do find the use of Achievements as puzzles remarkable.
1 - for hardcore players and their "boasting rights" thus inducing to compete to be on top of the ladder.
2- to minimize the psychological isolation produced by playing single-player games.
There's a third one, that i don't see useful as it's normally an afterthought, that is:
3- The replayability and durability of a game is so low that devs try to lengthen it with this artificial means we call achievements.
For me, the real achievements (and thousand times funnier than these "lack-of-life" achievements of nowadays) were those i experienced on coin-ops. Skilful (or lucky) players were able to make impossible things (devised or not by the devs).
You could see that on Toki: the way you could "neutralize" the first boss by hitting it with a rugby helmet...
or in Motocross Madness: if you fell down at the last jump, the motorcyclist was propelled so high that he flew over the Exit Sign (it was like a height jump contest!)
You might say these are not achievements but rather bugs. The thing is that these "bugs" added to the gameplay, they were "secret" stuff that added a new dimension to the game. Devs would do well to add this stuff on purpose along the game design of their games, it would help to rescue the old, long lost and so magic flavour of the games of the 8-bit era.