*I'll warn you now, this is an article about a facet of gaming culture*
You got a gold star! Congratulations, don't you feel special?
No? Then you're stupid, and worse than that you're a spoil sport, just trying to ruin everyone's fun.
At least, that's what the gaming industry wants to say to you. As most of you who are still with me are likely to recall, around the start of the console generation that's currently ending (or in real world terms, mid-2007) Microsoft introduced a crazy new idea to console gaming. It was called the achievement. Literally, it was called that. Everyone who knows what I'm talking about knows that I'm not joking.
The way this works is that when you complete a certain in-game criteria, you hear a little blip, you're treated to a nice little phrase and a cute picture, and then everyone who cares to look (which is no one, let's be frank) can see on your online profile that you've been crowned with the achievement. This was such a marketing success that Sony jumped in about two year later, demanded that "trophies" be put into all new games and backlogged them into older PS3 games.
Of course the achievements, by one name or another, come in different varieties. Most games give you at least two or three achievements for essentially nothing but booting up the game. I can think of a few games I've played where 10 seconds in I literally received an achievement for moving forward. However, just as the little reassuring blip at the bottom of your screen becomes a nice reminder of your progress, the stakes rise.
The first time your probably straight, white, male protagonist collects one of the thousand gems of wonderment scattered in random, meaningless parts of a meaningless digital world, you get a nice little blip and a trophy to let you know how much of a good boy you've been. There's probably another at 10, another at 100, and maybe one or two at 500 and 700. But what the game wants to fire home is that you haven't REALLY played the game unless you get all 1000 of them. After all, if you do that you get treated to a nice little blip on the bottom of your screen. Yes, you've wasted several hours of your life but at least you got that gold star.
The same thing is done with difficulty levels, but in a more frustrating way. Here, the game is literally designed to tell you either respectively how much of a wuss you are for playing the game on easy, barely handing out any achievements for a leisurely, fun, escapist romp through Space Marine Call of Honor 3: This time it's personal, in contrast handing them out like candy in a South American slum if you can somehow manage the blinding, banal, you died because you forgot to cross your toes on the second Tuesday of every fifth month while simultaneously weaving a basket 8 fathoms under boiling salt water torture of the "Veteran" or "Hardcore" difficulty.
Seriously though.
Granted, there are those for whom, apparently, even these vast difficulty levels are like grating cheese, but I have yet to meet one of these wizards, and back here on planet Earth I don't appreciate what the gaming industry has been doing for the last 6 years now.
My biggest problem with all of it is that it is specifically designed to destroy your life. Just to be clear, I'm not exaggerating there. King Henry VIII famously said once that time is a man's greatest loss because he can never get it back, and for all of his drunken whoring and church-making he was right on that point.
The whole system of meaning behind achievements is specifically designed so that you waste (not spend as you do when you're just playing the game) your time so that a paltry blip on the bottom of your screen and a quick little pun can make you feel better about yourself.
So buck the system! Go out, buy a game and play it on easy. Don't feel ashamed of yourself, just enjoy it. The whole point of gaming as a medium tends to be that one has fun while playing the game, whatever way one might want to. All that achievements do as a thing is tell you how to have your fun, whether or not you've had enough quite yet, and remind you that if you were really having fun the way you were supposed to, you'd be doing what the achievement tells you to do.
Congratulations, you made it to the end of the post. You get a PLATINUM star!
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ReplyDeleteI think it's all about the way these things are implemented. Call of Duty, for example, is a way NOT to do it. In those cases it adds artificial metrics of how "good" you are at the game (see, how much of your life you've wasted) without actually adding anything tangible to the game beyond a users epeen. Their difficulty levels again don't offer much as it doesn't change the experience, you get the same guns at the same times just fighting more enemies.
ReplyDeleteOn the opposite end of the spectrum we have Bioshock Infinite. A game that has quickly become one of my all time favorites. The different difficulty levels actually came in to play for me on my first play through in a big way. When I got to the end levels of the game I came to a rather disheartening realization. As it turns out, I kind of suck at the game and had purchased next to no upgrades for my characters and my weapons along the way and I simply did not have enough bullets to keep beating the enemies placed in front of me anymore. I brought nerf weapons to a gun fight and was losing, badly. So you know what I did? I turned the difficulty down to easy.
What would have happened if I hadn't been able to change the difficulty mid game? If I started on easy the beginning part of the game would have seemed like a cake walk and been far too boring and unchallenging. If I hadn't been able to turn it down to medium later, I would have had to start all over in order to beat the game as Bioshock Infinite is pretty linear and I would not have been able to go back in the game to grind out my character. The difficulty switching kept the game challenging for me while still offering me a way to complete the game if I sucked at the game (which I did).
Now as for achievements, Bioshock also does this quite well. The achievements offered in bioshock, save for the standard killed this many enemies with each gun, do add an element to the game. you can go through the whole game without ever getting a single voxophone or whatever-the-hell-the-other-one-is-called and still get the full story line, and a very good experience. This is what I did the first time. The second time through the game I'm actually trying to go for those, and I'm learning so much more about the world that the game takes place in. each voxophone and the other thing i can't remember the name of provides more background information that, while not necessary to beat the game or understand the core story, provide a more immersive experience. I'm finding the game more enjoyable on my second run through trying to complete these achievements because of the elements they add to the game.