We have mentioned on occasion that the main reason that the Xbox 360 exists is to deliver the Xbox Live service to your TV. There is something in Xbox Live for everyone. For people who care to play games with others on the Internet, something that I don’t really understand anymore, the friend tracking and online matchmaking in Xbox Live puts all other such services to shame. For people who want to not have to buy the next Ubisoft shooter to find out that it’s crap, the Live service provides downloadable demos and other content that make this easy. For those who like to spend their extra money on retro games they played 20 years ago, the Live Arcade is just the ticket.
Finally, for the marketing geeks in the audience there is the Xbox Live Achievements system. This attaches a persistent online profile to every Xbox Live customer. This profile tracks every single thing they do on the console, thus providing you the salesperson with perfect information about all of our gaming habits. Who could ask for more?
I understand why Microsoft would put something like this in the system. It gives them a way to collect information about who is playing what and for how long, and they can feed this information back to the publishers. This all makes sense. What I don’t understand is why anyone else cares.
In the first Xbox Live, a few games had online tracking of in-game achievments. The online scoreboards in Project Gotham and links to the online game records at Bungie in Halo 2 come to mind. The online information that Halo and Project Gotham collected on you made sense in the context of those two particular games. If you are playing a racing game, you probably care a bit about how fast you drive a particular car around a particular track as compared to other people on the planet. Similarly, if you are playing online deathmatch in Halo, it is nice to have a record of such games, in case you want to look back on old victories.
The Achievements system lacks this concrete connection to the gameplay. Instead, achievements are little abstract cookies like “You made it past level 2!” or “You killed the purple three-eyed boss monster with just your knife!” I know I did these things, I was playing the game while I did it. I probably did it to get to the next cut scene, and beyond that I really don’t care and I don’t understand why anyone else would care. Sure, you get “points”. But as of yet these points are even more useless than the other Xbox Live points you can get just by giving Microsoft money. Besides the utility of recording my actions for the demographers, I still don’t see the utility here. Achievment points are like Microsoft the crack dealer giving me extra kudos for getting high
Apparently, I am alone in my confusion. This sort of virtual trophy case is important to a lot of people. The sum total of good news for the PS3 in the last six months was the announcement of this “Home” system which appears to be nothing more than a 3-d room where fake people can walk around and look at each other’s fake loot. Come to think of it, Second Life is a whole pyramid scheme based on the idea that people will pay just as much money for fake stuff as real stuff. I gather that there are entire side industries that generate real money for fake stuff in World of Warcraft. In fact, this business is big enough to have gotten coverage on NPR, your Dork Nation news source.
Observing all of this brings me no closer to understanding what motivates people to pursure these strange virtual measures of their own self-worth. I understand why people enjoy playing the games. I understand many sources of pride related to playing games. There is the satisfaction of the final cut scene. There is the acquisition of mad skillz. I can understand these things as they are directly connected to the experience of the game itself. Achievements are an external and artificial meta-game. They are like a side-quest with no in-game payoff. You only notice them when you’ve turned the game off, and by then you don’t care anymore.
Let me get this straight: You fail to see why people like getting rewards? Yes, it’s a virtual reward, and the only payoff are bragging rights. And yet, it’s rewards.
While you play the game, it feels like a short little “thanks for playing so far” thing. Since all of it is exposed online, there are websites where you can compare your achievements with your friends, on a per-game basis. They are the shortcut to prove your mad skillz. Yes, some achievements are cheap – but not everybody will get the hard achievements, ever. I mean, once you played R6:Vegas, only very few will replay it on the harder difficulty level.
Yes, it’s a fairly cheap psychological trick. But that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable. It’s a virtual “attaboy”.
Groby’s on the money: it’s bragging rights. The cornerstone of nearly every online community – think forum post counts, user-profile upgrades, joining dates, slashdot IDs etc – bragging rights are what keeps people coming back to sink more time into a site.
Sure, it makes no sense to you, but then you’re a well adjusted adult who has plenty of other things in his life to help him appreciate his own value. Think of the children! Those poor sods, sitting at home, awkward and ill-prepared for real interactions get a genuine sense of social value out of their achievements, post count etc. When the news about Home broke here, my boss and I basically said to each other, “It’s not for me, but the kids will love it.” And I think they will.
As I said in another forum, people will pay real money to trick out their virtual lives, and since the products they are buying have no manufacturing or distribution costs, Sony are essentially developing a way to create money from nothing, like credit card companies. Bragging and posturing are a part of basic animal psychology, and I am sure they will be very successful.
I think Groby is right about rewards (why do you consider a boring FMV to be more rewarding than Gamerscore?), though Nik’s mention of bragging rights is a little narrow – yes, there are bragging rights, but that’s only a part of it.
Achievements also encourage you to play the game in different ways and get more value out of the game you just spent an awful lot of money on. Alright, if it’s a truly brilliant game it won’t need any extra incentives – but the archetypal example is the “pacifist” achievement in Geometry Wars – who would otherwise try and last a whole minute in the game without firing a shot? It took me quite a few attempts to achieve it, so that was another half hour or so added onto my enjoyment of the game. In other games, similar achievements have opened up whole areas of the game I never even knew existed – seeking 1000 gamerpoints in Tomb Raider Legend nearly doubled the length of time I spent with that game.
Let’s be honest, and being someone who develops 360 games I’m as aware of this as the next man, a next-gen console (of whichever flavour) and a decent selection of games to go with it adds up to a LOT of money. Anything that extends replay value even slightly is a Good Thing in my book.
An anecdote.
Several years ago, I attended a funeral for an ‘uncle’ of mine; my uncle, as my father had been, was a member of a monastic order. Vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and all that stuff. Spent their time teaching in urban hellholes. These guys couldn’t compare incomes, wives, or possessions, since they didn’t have any of them.
Instead, they figured out how well they could game the Catholic educational system in order to accumulate degrees – if they were teaching in Indiana, they’d go to Notre Dame. In Pittsburgh, Duquesne. They figured out the most efficient way to acquire as many degrees with as few credit-hours as possible (this is also responsible for some very odd impressions I have of Catholicism; for years, I thought all that nuns did was hog seminars). When my uncle died, he had 9 master’s degrees, three of which were MBA’s.
The result of this? I am firmly convinced that in any situation, if you get enough people together, they will figure out a way to establish some kind of “look at me!” hierarchy. I’m fairly sure that if you had a “hit myself in the face with a hammer” award with a nice shiny medal, people would be not only aiming for it, they’d fight each other for it.