What you've achieved; what you've chosen

Originally posted on the Chromed blog here.

When Microsoft announced platform wide achievements for the Xbox 360, it was a masterstroke. You’d get additional rewards for performing specific feats in every game on the platform, you’d be awarded points aggregating into a total gamer score, and best of all, you’d be able to see if your number was bigger than your friend’s numbers.

It was a shrewd move. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 are, on paper, largely equivalent pieces of hardware where performance is concerned, and both would surely feature essentially identical versions of most major games from large 3rd party publishers. By creating a unified achievements system, Microsoft gave gamers a reason to favor their platform over Sony’s.

That was five years ago.

We’ve now seen the growth of achievement like platforms. Unsurprisingly, Sony integrated trophies for the PS3, with medal colors standing in for numeric points. Valve’s Steam service and Blizzard’s Battle.net also offer achievements for 1st party titles.

The notion has even caught on outside of the video game industry, with a variety of websites offering badges, achievements, virtual elected offices, and any number of other achievement analogues to their users for doing all manner of mundane activities.

Now that we’ve had time to watch the spread of achievements and their effect on game development, achievements don’t seem quite as brilliant as they did five years ago.

Perhaps the most insidious side effect of achievements is that they create a set of incentives that competes with those found within the game. They can become a meta-game that does not support the game, but undermines it.

Sid Meier famously described games as a series of interesting choices. Achievements, then, are designer-dictated decisions for the player to make when confronted with those choices, contextualized within a broader scope than that of the game itself. Because of this, they can drive players to play the meta-game to the exclusion of the game itself.

For example, imagine a game with a simple morality system where a player’s character can become ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’ or some ratio of the two. But the designer provided an achievement for completing the game as a 100% ‘Evil’ and no other achievements based on the morality system.

Games take a long time to beat, and most players likely won’t play the game a second time. The player is then presented with a conundrum: They can dedicate their one full playthru of the game to getting the achievement,and in so doing give up their agency to make the interesting choices the game presents, or they can play the game as they choose and consequently have an incomplete set of achievements – and likely fall behind their friends’ collection efforts. They are forced to chose between the game and the meta-game.

Designers must be careful to avoid creating situations like the above hypothetical. To this end, we must be mindful of how the achievements we design influence the decisions that players make when we provide them with choices, and strive to ensure that the meta-game will support the player’s enjoyment of the game itself.

We are game designers first, just as our players are gamers first. The meta-game must be secondary to the game if the game itself is to be satisfying.