I can understand the distaste that some players and developers have for the little pop-up message at the bottom of the screen. Many see it as breaking down the gaming experience, the art form, into an itemised check list of chores that cheapens the game.
Many would also argue that the journey through the narrative and mechanics should be a reward in and of itself. This is simply not true for all people and all games. The small, mental reward for performing 50 head shots or clearing a level without dying is simply something that is gratifying to the lizard brain and is fuelled by the saying “A journey of a 1000 miles starts with one step”. Achievements are often those baby steps.
There are definitely uninspired, lazy and even game-ruining achievements but that is certainly something that is the fault of the person who implemented them (it breaks my heart to admit I have been responsible for getting some good achievements killed), not the achievements themselves.
To make achievements work for your game you have to first understand what makes your game compelling and fun and then how achievements can become an extension maybe even a way to extend that experience for the player.
To use another example of a feature that is usually implemented for these purposes: if you are making a football game you aren’t going to then have the multi-player consist entirely of Rocket-Arena deathmatches are you?
There’s an element of nail-on-head to what AJ has said above. Most of the problems people seem to have with achievements are that they’re often integrated in a very lazy fashion. Any number of “I spent 24 hours getting achievements” articles on gaming blogs mention a handful of titles that are played solely in order to reap an easy collection of Gs. I can’t disagree that, if this is the approach developers take, achievements are a pointless distraction.
A game AJ mentioned recently is Enchanted Arms, which rewards achievements at plot points and by completing the game you’ll unlock everything. That game has fiendish quantities of hidden stuff, he asked, so why not tie achievements into that? At the time I agreed, but in retrospect I wonder if it was not a deliberate decision by the game’s developers. Surely the finding of hidden goodies is its own reward – the opening up of new tactical possibilities to dedicated explorers? After all, tying achievements into that would push more people into exploration and grinding – and if they didn’t want to do that when there were no achievements involved, why should their hand be forced? There is of course an obvious counter-argument – players should enjoy the game how they want to and achievements add an additional layer of reward. But for some, the joy is in chasing down that reward – even if it begins to feel like work rather than play.
There’s a deeper psychological question surrounding the very idea of achievements, tying into the ideas of compulsion and ‘open loops’. A lot of gamers like to collect and see everything within a game. The desire to “100%” a title, to be able to say you have seen and done everything worth seeing, is a powerful one. You can put a game down and say that you’re done with it, you’ve done all there is to do. But you can’t do that if you’re stuck at 900 gamerscore for a title. By tying achievements into an arbitrary scoring system, Microsoft have latched hooks into parts of the lizard brain that like both closed loops and a sense of unstoppable progress (the same compulsion that drives many MMOs).
I prefer the type of achievements used in Valve’s Steam service. Valve’s own achievements are wonderful. There are now hundreds of achievements for Team Fortress 2 and most of them are extremely hard to get, involving the sort of situational coincidences that only arise through hundreds of hours of play. They did misstep for a while, by tying unique item unlocks into achievements, which resulted in soulless achievement servers designed only to grind achievements and items. Now the process is more random – just like players’ ability to unlock achievements. Now it actually feels like it should – an acknowledgement that through luck and skill and more luck, something unusual has happened to you. You get a little badge for that, and that’s all.
Whilst I do like Microsoft’s approach to achievements, and I like that they contribute to a greater whole – even if it is fundamentally meaningless – I find them representative of a troubling cynicism in the game industry, in which as players we are little more than mindless consumers blindly chasing bigger numbers to prop up some weird kind of social status. The more I think about achievements, the more they worry me.
If I were to put together a list of the greatest significant innovations in console gaming, achievements would make an appearance near the top of that list surrounded by lots of other entries all involving the word ‘Nintendo’. To my mind it’s Microsoft’s greatest contribution to gaming.
To demonstrate why I think this let’s look at my favourite set of achievements in 2010: those of PlayDead’s superb atmospheric puzzle platformer Limbo. After initial completion the game – which I had enjoyed though I found it a bit short and a bit frustrating – I lost interest. Still, a small part of me wanted to play it just a little more.
I tend to browse achievement lists in lieu of reading interesting manuals as with the gaming of old. One achievement on Limbo’s list was gazing at me, sexed-up and encouraging me to do bad things. Long-term-trial-and-error-immensely-satisfying-but-painfully-repetitive-in-a-sort-of-good-way bad things.
“No Point In Dying: Complete the game in one sitting with five or less deathsâ€
Hmmm.
This one seemed like a big ask for a game I hadn’t loved, but I decided to indulge my whim and give the achievement a go. A week later I’d played hours upon hours of Limbo and had learned to adore the game, discovering the joys of other more puzzle-based achievements, the game’s secret areas, its robust physics engine, and the beautifully detailed animation of everything on display in its bleak, weird world.
An achievement changed my game. It turned a fun yet brief distraction into an absolute joy – albeit one that didn’t fully reveal itself until it had been given the special attention my cheev-whoring impulse had justified.
That achievement is an example of my favourite type; I think of them as Developer Approved Challenges™. If achievements didn’t exist I could have invented my own challenge to prolong the life of the game but, as I’m not a professional game designer and don’t know the game inside out as they do, I lack the knowledge and skill to decide on a goal that balances challenge and difficulty correctly.
Whilst working on unlocking No Point In Dying I also turned my attention to the bulk of Limbo’s achievements, which are the ‘egg hunt’ achievements. Numerous eggs are hidden throughout the Limbo world. The title of the achievement associated with each egg is a clue to its location, and the achievement’s description is a clue on how to get to it. The achievements are listed in chronological order, so each one you find narrows down the places where the others could be, much as each answer of a crossword or filled Sudoku box gives the player a hint on their approach to the next answer.
It’s an innovative use of the achievements system but also an example of how a creative developer can turn a ‘restriction’ – that achievements are systematically built into the UI – to their advantage. There is no room in the world of Limbo for this kind of information: it would destroy the effectiveness of that intensely lonely setting if the Boy had a little friend giving him clues, or encountered scattered signs displaying hints, or, even worse, information was printed on screen for the player in a lifeless dialog box. Instead they are still very much a part of the game, integrated as significantly as any other, yet kept separate so they don’t interfere with the fiction. They’re optional, obviously, but you can still spend satisfying time figuring out clues and exploring the game more thoroughly as a result.
At the same time I dislike Limbo achievements because you receive 100g for completing it. That’s too much for a fairly easy game and, more importantly, they could have offered 20g for completing it and spent the other 80g on 8 more eggs, adding much more value to the game. This is why I dislike people saying “I don’t like achievementsâ€. It’s just not that simple; my favourite game for achievements also angers me because it has bad achievements.
As with anything offering creative space we will find ways to approach them in increasingly imaginative and complex ways. Limbo’s eggs are probably the best example I have of this, but The Simpsons Game, Borderlands and Dishwasher: Dead Samarai all use achievements to create comedy, Left 4 Dead uses them to train players in good tactics and encourage team-play in online matches, and the trophies for Resonance of Fate on the PS3 are arranged in such a way on the dashboard that, if you’ve unlocked all of them, it forms a picture of Basel. That’s awesome.
Plus, if you don’t like them, you can turn the notifications off. And just ignore them. And stop complaining.
Comments
13 responses to “Achievement Unlocked: revisiting the argument”
Some developers don't design a game with achievements in mind and merely tack them on at the end as it is a requirement. Others choose carefully and cleverly crafted methods to integrate gameplay with the achievements and then few players ever see them so the time and effort is largely wasted. Even worse the lack of being able to '100%' in the way Shaun describes can cause a backlash against the imaginative developer although conversely there are some gamers who are simple achievement whores and will gladly pick up a game if they can get easy achievements.
My own view is that there should always be a balance then between the achievable through normal gameplay, the achievable through accident and the rare collectables that take focussed hard work. This won't please all the people all the time but should cover most bases. But the simple truth is that there is not a one size fits all.
The mere point we're talking about it and that Sony, Valve and now Apple have mimicked Microsoft's system shows that Dylan is correct. They are Microsoft's greatest contribution to gaming but the contribution has only come into being because they are a requirement. And it's that stance that gives us the breadth of the good the bad and the ugly.
While they can cause frustration they can also provide pleasure and even lead players to new experiences in games they would otherwise not have.
This conveniently ties into a much larger piece I wrote, expect to see that go up on badger commander blog at some point in the next couple of weeks.
Agree with all your points, there is no perfect fit, but there are some really lazy achievements out there and I am sick of them. I don't mind not being able to 100% a game, I have only done that for three that I own. I do, however, what to be rewarded and encouraged to play the game.
Also, you have to ignore the achievement whores from the list of potential target audience, unless your game has no merit of its own, you should never target them as they will find their own way of unlocking everything. That is how they rinse enjoyment from games.
Look forward to reading it.
There are some games which simply don't suit achievements. Could you come up with enough variety and interesting achievements for every game you've ever played? Would you be able to do the same for something like Teris or even the myriad of small indie games out there? There are of course games that would suit them but a decision was made not to focus on them. I'd rather have developers concentrate on the game they want to make. Sure, often there's a good fit but it's not always the case and sometimes you do end up with them being shoe-horned on.
If a game has pretty standard boring achievements it doesn't upset me in the same way it would if the game itself was substandard. I'm pleased with interesting achievements and like the imaginative or obscure ones that pop up, but it's a bonus for me over the core game.
I'm not making an excuse for every bad implementation here, merely trying to make the point it's something that will always happen when a system is universal. While I agree with the disappointment of having lazy achievements, breadth of implementation is the price you pay for enforcing such a standard. Not every game will have or can have great achievements.
Although that is true about the universal system, I have to say that pretty much every game, could have 'good' achievements.
Yes, I am aware of the consideration that most developers put into achievements, but the truth with Acheivements (on the X360 at least) is that theya re only required to have 6 and they DO NOT have to add up 1000 (early games like Condemened only have 970).
Developers ferak out because they are worried about the, perceived, diminished value of not having 1000 achievement points (for a disc-based game) so then they shoe horn them in.
I can think of two or three crappy games that could have been made quite fun with the implementation of good achievements.
Gordo mentions below the teaching of tactics, this is actually my favourite type of achievement, one that engourages to unlock an achievement but the reward is that you learn more about the game.
In-fact, Dylan mentioned it in the article above and was a slight revelation to me, I'm not the biggest L4D/2 player, but what he mentioned made the few achievements I do have make more sense, and it's encouraging me slightly to return a bit more frequently. Plus it is the only game I actually play co-op with people (people I know for that matter as well!)
Just clarifying that so Dylan doesn't ferak out…
If all games had thoughtful achievements like that I might actually be actively interested in them.
"I'm not making an excuse for every bad implementation here, merely trying to make the point it's something that will always happen when a system is universal. While I agree with the disappointment of having lazy achievements, breadth of implementation is the price you pay for enforcing such a standard. Not every game will have or can have great achievements."
Well said, that's a very important point.
Achievements strike me as an overly console type of reward and subsequently are not something I will miss when not included in my PC games. However, when implemented into a game thoughtfully to encourage play I can appreciate them.
Perhaps not the best example but Just Cause 2 (think what you may of me, the game is fun!) encouraged me to sky dive further than I likely would have if they hadn't nudged me with an achievement. It's not that I wouldn't have been jumping of mountains with reckless abandon myself at any opportunity I was given, but without the added incentive I wouldn't have risked death to see how far I could fall with style…(To infinity and beyond).
On the other side of the fence however all it took for me to veer off course from plot progression in Far Cry 2 was a simple innocent flashing green light on a tiny GPS tucked almost out of view. That light stole my attention and blindly led me like a cat following a laser pointer. I didn't need an achievement to convince me to pursue that.
I'm with Shaun and wag my finger at the reward of actual goods for any achievements completed as that just seems besides the point of them and will likely lead to abundant stat padding. The Left4Dead model of teaching tactics through reward seems quite well thought out and I never saw it like that.
I think the strength of achievements is in them encouraging play instead of simply rewarding it. Dylan's Limbo example is dead on for this, the achievements hint towards the solution for a reward that is not absolutely necessary. As a fairly compulsive completionist in Single Player games I will scour what the Dev team hath provided me with for all the little details because I like seeing them and appreciating the attention to details (when it's actually there) and a little badge saying you've found this or done that, isn't required but is kinda nice from time to time, like patting yourself on the back.
PS: Please disregard any Toy Story quotes found within…
I still think there should be more ''achievements'' along the lines of those found in Afterburner Climax where in-game ''debug'' options become available for the player to ''enjoy'' or unlock other achievements or just replay the game with extra handicap or added ammunition/armour/bullet-time.
I know what you're going to say: ''Where's the pride in finishing the entire game with 100% kills if you had unlimited everything to do so''.
I would honestly say there is none. But with a game like Afterburner Climax for example, unlimited everything can actually be a game of its own. Achievements gain a nature which escape a lot of those found nowadays, while stripping themselves of something all-too-common with them as well: they become fun and kill their ego.
I've noticed a few other games have taken such approach in a ''less gratuitously rewarding way'' (aka: more balanced). I'm surprised it happens to be where I least expected it: In 100% of the DS games I own… which means… Super Scribblenauts and Phantasy Star Zero. It's well done too. You do something awesome? Congratulation! Here, CONTENT…. o and a useless title… but HEY! CONTENT!!!
My favourite achievement: The first one you unlock in GTA: Lost and Damned. I think it's called Ten Percent or something, awarded for completing ten percent of the game – which takes a fair amount of time. Nothing but dick swinging from Rockstar: – It's them going "Nyer nyer, look how big our DLC is, nyer nyer nyer" and absolutely fuck all else.
That's why I love the fuck out of Rockstar.
And the reason I hate the fuck out of Rockstar?
Walk out of a 6 stars wanted level… nothing. Walk out of a 4 stars wanted level? HEY! ACHIEVEMENT!!1
You’d think I would have been given the Walk Free achievement in the process of outsmarting THE CIA in losing the cops ON FOOT for god-knows-how-long with my 6 stars, you know, like most games don’t actually force you to go ”finish the game on easy” to get the ”you finished the game on easy” achievement after having aced it on hard…
Unless that game is EDF…
Damn, I have to wait until July for Insect Armageddon. Damn you D3, damn you to hell.
Playing more EDF is never a bad thing. Plus, playing it on a comically easy difficulty means you can experiment with all the shit weapons you never use! :D
I wish I was playing EDF instead of typing this.
But yes, EDF is the the only viable exception I can think of. For pretty much the reason you've mentioned.