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Addicted to Fake Achievment
There's a really great article over at Pixel Poppers called Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement. This guy is really just saying a lot of the things we have always been saying here at GeekNights. However, he comes at it from a different angle that does not involve game theory, so I think it's a little more accessible.
Comments
Otherwise, that was a good read. We've talked quite a lot about games not being sufficiently difficult, but this guy does a good job of breaking down how we get addicted to mediocrity.
EDIT: I will say that good RPG's do have challenges within them (puzzles, hard fights, and so forth), but that yes, overall, victory is inevitable. The last 20 or so hours of Dragon Age have been hard as balls, with lots of reloading and attempts at different strategies, but I can feel the difficulty curve starting to break.
EDIT 2: I take that back. Fuck you, Corrupted Spider Matriarch.
Skilled gamers can drill down to the core of a game pretty rapidly. You don't need to play Ra more than once to understand that it's just a slot machine. Once you understand the wholeness of what a game is at its core, it's very difficult to continue to enjoy said game unless this knowledge does not provide a perfect play strategy.
If I don't understand a game and have not mastered it, then I must continue to play until I achieve understanding or mastery.
If I don't understand a game and have mastered it, then I must continue to play until I understand how I have mastered it.
If I understand a game and have not mastered it, I will only continue playing if what remains to be mastered is stimulating (dexterity, for example) or worthwhile independent of the understanding. For example, if I learn how to win at Mario Kart DS (snaking), but mastery of this is unpleasant and unstimulating (snaking), then I have no reason to continue playing.
If I understand a game and have mastered it, then there is no reason to ever play again except to teach or to prove my mastery.
Very rarely will understanding of a game be delayed beyond a short amount of initial play, except in cases where investment in a bad or understood part of the game is required in order to access other, better content (which itself is the GaoGaiGar situation, hardly optimal). In fact, a game I could not understand is intriguing until I do so. But, once understood, unless the game has more to offer beyond understanding, there is no reason to ever play it again.
I understand WoW. I have chosen not to master it. I understand Advance Wars, and have continued to work toward total mastery. I understand CounterStrike, but I have not mastered it due to the high skill cap. I understand HoN, but again choose not to master it. I do not understand T&E fully, and continue to work toward mastery as a test of my intelligence.
Number one is the way TF2 uses achievements. They give you some reward, and an actual in-game advantage for partaking in some activity that is not winning the game. Anything that encourages players to do something besides try to win with all of their might, especially in a multiplayer game, is basically encouraging griefing. It's just really really bad on so many levels. The fact that people have servers just to farm the achievements really shows you something is wrong. You never see that in CS or NS or any real game.
Achievements destroy immersion. If I'm deep into HL2 and some extraneous message shows up, that totally brings me out of the game.
Why does their have to be a system of points, and badges, and showing off, and such and such. If you think it would be cool for people to dry to beat a level without jumping, just post a list of suggested challenges. With the gamer scores and such, people get obsessed with it, and it becomes just like leveling in WoW. People will sit their doing things that they would otherwise never do, and they will admit they are not having fun, simply because they really really want their gamer score to go up. I've even heard of people buying games they would never otherwise buy because the game had achievements that were trivial to get, and were worth a lot of points.
Obviously not everyone is so affected by the score, so the players who are obsessed with it bear much of the blame. Though for the players who do not care about the score, what purpose does it serve? You either care, and it will affect your behavior, or you don't care, and it might as well not exist.
Why I Don't Play World of Warcraft
Looks like the "professional" game reviewers don't dig WoW either.
Achievements do in fact add something to the game. At the very least Rym's obsession with S-Ranks in Advance Wars should tell you as much.
Also, some achievements are secret! Yes, you can look them up on the Internet. But the fact that secret achievements even exist really destroys a lot of the arguments in defense of them.
Playing games makes people happy. Everyone should be able to play the game the way they want to regardless of how they do it by meager tasks or completing the storyline. This guy felt that he was playing games for all the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean that we should feel dirty for wanting to completing all the achievements in a game.
2. We have already talked about that not all achievements are the same, a point also well made in the article you linked to! Secret achievements aren't necessarily something I agree with. You on the other hand are trying to lump them all together. Secret Achievements can be somewhat usefull, e.g. when the achievement is based on an element in the story.
As stated multiple times before, it all depends on the implementation. However, the concept of achievements, that is to say rewards for doing something inside a game that do not necessarily have any influence on the game itself, isn't anything really objectionable.
Nothing. No difference at all. Leveling up in an RPG is practically meaningless, yet is so often the majority of the experience offered. This is why I haven't touched one in quite some time. I am sure that there are good ones out there, but I played one too many duds.
Also, see our Beyond D+D Panel for our discussion of why Final Fantasy, D&D;, Burning Wheel, and LARPs are all referred to as RPGs, when they are heavily dissimilar.
You could even have achievements for Netflix (on xbox) based on movies watched. Watch 5 Schwarzenegger movies in a 24 hour period and you get the 'Hasta La Vista, Baby' achievement.
As to the achievements present in games today there clearly are two varieties, earned and given.
Earned achievements are the ones that you have to actively do something that requires skill to earn (survive 1 hour in a deathmatch game without ever getting killed). These achievements are clearly for bragging rights and they allow you to brag beyond the group of players you earned the achievement with.
Given achievements are the ones you earn just by playing the game (win your first fight). The only thing a given achievement says is that you have played the game and gotten X far into the game. These achievements confer no bragging rights at all except to prove that you have gotten X far into a game.
Back in the day there were no achievements. We had to keep a Polaroid camera by the TV to record our high scores and other events. With achievements we don't need to do that anymore (though many PC gamers still do screen caps). We also did not have the benefit of the Internet so one could gain bragging rights for completing a hard game by revealing some sort of information that was only gained after completing a game (You didn't know Samus was a girl until you completed Metroid and she took her helmet off). Once you told enough people about a given piece of post-game knowledge that piece of information was no longer valid as proof that YOU had completed the game.
I like achievements. I think they extend the play life of some games in that they add something extra to do once you beat the game's story mode. Some achievements also lead to bonus content being unlocked and extra game modes being made available. I do not consider a game truly completed until I have acquired all of the achievements (I have only gotten 100% of achievements on two games, Lost Via Domus and Fallout3).
Do achievements affect my level of immersion in a game? Nope, not at all. Do achievements affect my decision to purchase a game? Nope.
I have been meaning to write an article about achievements but every time I get around to writing it some better article appears and I don't want my article to be perceived as some lame attempt to jump on a bandwagon.