Rewarding Gameplay

Achievements, aren't they fantastic? No?

I find that for the most part that achievements in games are either stupid or far too easy. When reaching a certain point in the story of a game is an "achievement", the game creators have very low expectations. Or they're struggling to find something to label as an achievement because achievements are the thing you do at the moment. I find them either too straightforward or frustrating to accomplish. Some times there are some in the middle there, when it does take some skill and effort to attain. As an example, the challenge mode achievements in Batman: Arkham Asylum and Arkham City. You have to get into the right rhythm for combat as well as know how to build up points. Granted the best method for gaining points in the combat challenges is to just have really long combo multipliers, which is simple but can be difficult in practice. Or maybe I just suck at it.

There are too many examples of the "reach this point in the story" achievements to cite here, so I'll assume you know what I'm talking about. If not, why are you reading about games if you don't play them? There are of course those that are a reward for some banal or random task, such as what I've heard about World of Warcraft which has an achievement for catching fish, even though fishing is just some idle thing that your character can do.

On the other hand, some games like to provide the players with a glut of achievements. Currently Killing Floor has 209 achievements, a large portion of which are for completing maps on different difficulty levels. Given that there are four levels for which there are achievements, they are a simple solution for the developers, but also rather annoying. At least they're annoying to me, I look at the list and think: "I don't want to play the game that much."

But I think this raises the most pertinent point: do players really want to achieve this? I suppose before the advent of in-game achievements, players would make up their own to brag to others about. Now the developers can decide for you. Except of course for the fact that many achievements are easily attained. So people will still find absurd applications of their time that add up to something worthy of bragging about; it's just that some of those things will have the equivalent of a boy scout patch to prove that they did it.

Which is why we still have leaderboards. Achievements aside - leaderboards show just how fast or skillful you are. Except of course where they don't. In the aforementioned Batman games, the number one position for challenges is usually held by someone who apparently earned about a trillion points in a millisecond. If that confuses you, they cheated, obviously. I've seen several leaderboards topped by obvious hackers, so we know that you really suck and couldn't accomplish that.

So, most achievements are pointless or they can be gained by cheating... is there a point to them? I think it depends on what use they are put to. In the first Mass Effect, achievements were awarded for various skill uses or character uses, but the achievements had an effect on actual gameplay: allowing access to certain skills that weren't available for your character class, health regeneration, faster skill cooldown and such. In Alpha Protocol you were awarded "perks" depending on your actions during gameplay that assisted is similar ways: faster skill cooldown, extra points for levelling up your skills, so forth. They meant something to the gameplay, rather than just being arbitrary awards for doing whatever.

I can't think of many ways that achievements could be put to actual use, other than those I've already cited. This is just a bit of rambling about a somewhat nonsensical subject. Gamers were always making up their own achievements anyway, even arcade games were about attaining a high score and getting your name (or initials) onto the scoreboard, even if most of them ended up being POO or ASS. I think that demonstrates just how seriously gamers take the issue.