Why Achievements in Gaming Are a Blessing in Disguise

I love the people I play video games with. After years and years of XBOXLIVE I have struck a healthy mix of real life buddies and online acquaintances. A motley crew of obsessives, casuals, trolls and bros. Usually everyone gets along, but the one thing we can never all agree on is achievements. Some of my buddies hate them. They feel that they do nothing but cause pain and misery for perfectionist types and serve no purpose other than to keep you playing shitty games. Others enjoy the thrill of the hunt, going on sites like Trueachievements and finding ways to subvert the games in order to rack up huge numbers. Others simply don€™t care, and just want to play video games. But whether you like them or not, achievements, trophies and in-game collectibles are here to stay. But before I try to sell you on achievements, I want to tell you a short story. It's 1:30AM and I€™m sitting alone in my basement. The glow of my television fills the room while I read about a previous patch for Prince of Persia. Apparently, with this new patch, upon beating the game you now get awarded the achievements for falling less than 100 times (no small feat) and for completing the game in less than 12 hours (which I would have earned anyway). I had received the game as a Christmas gift back in 2008 and played it contently for years afterward. I thought that I had beaten the game a couple years ago but after doing some additional reading I learned that there were three points the credits roll during the game. I had only seen the credits roll once. After booting up the game I quickly realize that I€™m fairly close to that area€™s fertile ground€” where you fight a specialized corrupted enemy to restore the area and move on. After carefully dispatching this particular corrupted, known as the Hunter, Elika and the Prince humorously discuss how it€™s time to go save the world. I look at the clock again, the digital face reads 2:14 and I think to myself: I€™ve got time to save the world I guess. In the past month or so I have found myself returning to older games to either complete or further perfect my gameplay. The first was Devil May Cry 4, a game I beat on the lowest difficulty and quickly got frustrated with. In the past month I: more than doubled my achievement count from 15 to 31, completed the game on much harder difficulties, greatly improved my Bloody Palace (challenge mode) high score from 18 to 79 floors (out of 101) and learned a great deal about the game. Much like with anything else in life, the more you do something the better you get at it. You begin to learn little tricks or shortcuts to improve your abilities or make life a little easier. After playing some more I began to notice that so long as no enemies are visible on screen in DMC4, nothing would attack you. I learned that it€™s better to map your gun to the right trigger so that you can charge powerful shots while still hacking and slashing people to bits, drastically improving my demon slaying ability. Just like Prince of Persia, I bought Devil May Cry 4 back in 2008 and sit in my basement simply stunned by my own progress. In just over a month I did far more than I ever accomplished in the past four years of owning the game. A few nights later, while scanning my games played, it dawned on me that Assassin€™s Creed: Brotherhood was the only Assassin€™s Creed game in which I didn€™t obtain all the achievements. That night I also learned that my brother owned The Disappearance of DaVinci DLC; after moving my game save over to his hard-drive I quickly completed it and am now just 3 achievements shy of a perfect game (the DLC was excellent). This all started back at the end of April, but it was only late that night, at 3:30 in the morning that the truth of it dawned on me. In Prince of Persia there is an achievement called Precious Time, I thought I missed it because of my confusion regarding the credits but I didn€™t. The achievement requires you, while holding Elika in your arms, to stand perfectly still for 60 seconds during the credits. It was during this minute that I realized why I had gone back to complete these three games, why I had picked them all up years later. I wanted to get more achievements. Achievements are an annoying and ingenious way to have players endlessly obsess over games that they would otherwise have permanently cast aside. Every time I think about trophies and achievements I think about one particular scene from Kingdom of Heaven with Orlando Bloom. After all the sieging and fighting for Jerusalem, Balian turns to Saladin and asks him what Jerusalem is worth. Saladin turns to Balian and says nothing as he begins to walk away. Then, he turns again and raises two clenched fists with a brilliant smile as he replies €œEverything!€ Achievements are a meaningless number; some achievements will award you with avatar items upon completion (a feature I am a huge fan of), but for the most part they don€™t get you anything. The achievements are only as meaningful as you want them to be. I don€™t obsess over them nearly as much as others do, but I do enjoy keeping a decent completion ratio across my library. Like many games, half the fun is keeping good stats and records; you€™ll feel a lot better about yourself if your kills-per-death is 2.10 compared to 0.34. Not all games have achievements, which beckons the question, why did we ever need them? Before home consoles you had the arcade€” scores carved into leaderboards and fought over by all. With the arrival of handheld systems and home consoles things changed slightly. Some games offered leaderboards, whether it be worldwide or just local (I still can€™t beat my father€™s score on Pokemon Pinball for the Gameboy Color). But where do you go after you beat the crap out of Ganon, or best the Elite 4? My brother would make minimalist runs of Zelda games with the smallest possible amount of health, and in Pokemon games I would only use Pokeballs to catch em€™ all. Achievements merely bridged the gap between additional skill testing challenges and simply playing through the game. At the end of the day, I think achievements and trophies are a good thing. They won€™t bother people who don€™t care and people who do seek to collect them will do so because it€™s something they want to do. This past month I picked up three games that I hadn€™t sat down and played in months (in some cases years) and had a great time doing so. AC: B and its additional DLC got me pumped for AC3, I greatly improved my gameplay in DMC4 and after four years in the making I finally finished Prince of Persia. I know a lot of people that obsess unhealthily about their Gamerscore, who will even cheat and alter profile data to improve their numbers. But these are the people that stayed up late into the morning to help me get the Most Wanted achievement in Red Dead Redemption. These are the same people that worked with me all summer to complete the Dark Corners DLC pack for Gears of War 2 and they are the same people that will get online for a rousing game of Team Slayer. At the end of the day, achievements bring players together and keep people playing video games. Any mechanism that can get me to play games I haven€™t touched in years, and enjoy them, is a great feature in my book.