Reinventing The Gaming Addiction with 360 Achievements

Until now we have been playing games just long enough to defeat them so that we can feel a strong form of satisfaction and accomplishment.  In single player gaming environments we have learned that once the game has been beaten and we’ve seen the scrolling credits that its time to shelf the game or sell it off to our local EB Games, GameStop, or other game outlet.  The 360 achievement system gives the casual gamers and the hardcore gamers one more outlet of addiction. For years I have been playing games and occasionally beating the games but the end result is always the same: shelf the game for life. The 360 achievement system changes all that by making games full feature set more desirable. The game, of course, will not last forever but the reply value increases and thus the “money spent” becomes more justifiable.

This system also gives the hardcore gamer who lives for “stats” a reason to exist. Lets start with the basics, what exactly is a gamer score and 360 achievements for those that have yet to obtain the mystical Xbox 360 at local stores?

The 360 achievement system is a set of 1000 gamer points (GP) or 200 GP for downloadable arcade games that a developer can program into their game. You can achieve these points in many ways. Here is a breakdown of different gamer point distributions:

• Defeating the game: Almost all games for the Xbox 360 give some number of achievement points for finishing a game on regular, hard, and/or hardcore.  For example, Madden NFL ‘06 gives you a set number of achievements for winning a Franchise Super Bowl, Project Gotham Racing 3 gives you a varying number of gamer points for winning the championship on its varying levels of difficulty, and Call of Duty 2 gives you either 150GP for defeating the Axis on Easy thru Regular and 200GP for defeating the Axis on ‘veteran’ or ‘hardened’ difficulty.  You also get all GP for every level of difficulty if you started the game on hard.  In the case of Call of Duty 2 you would get 200GP + 150GP instantly by beating the game on veteran/hardcore level the first time around.
  


• Level Accomplishment: Each level you beat may give you a smaller value of GP, such as Condemned which hands you 10GP every time you win a chapter in the game, or Call of Duty 2 which shells out 60GP every time you win a mission on Veteran difficulty (0 GP for completing it on any other level of difficulty!).


• Exploration: Developers put a lot of time and effort into game level design and they reward you for searching it all out with gamer points.  Kameo will hand out varying degrees of gamer points for finding certain items hidden in the game.  These 360 achievements are ‘unlockable’ (they do not give you the cause and effect for obtaining the achievements… you have to figure them out on your own or buy the strategy guide). Condemned has very extensive (albeit dark) scenarios that can hide many secrets (and enemies).  Gain 10GP if you find the “Static TV Xbox 360” that’s sitting on a desk in a subway system behind a hidden entrance blocked by a large desk.  You gain another 10GP every time you find a dead bird in each chapter.  In Project Gotham Racing 3 you can become an “Arcade Player” (worth 15GP) if you find the two hidden games of Geometry Wars and play them each once.


• Persistence: Games like Quake and Condemned have scenarios that give you gamer points if you complete a certain level with a specific type of item.  Perhaps you have to finish three levels of Condemned with only a melee weapon to unlock “Silver Melee Master Award” or complete a level using only the nail gun in Quake to receive 10GP for the “Tooth and Nail” achievement.  Not only must you master a game, but you must master it with all weapons, all types of battle, and multiple times.  Project Gotham Racing 3 serves up some gamer points every time you collect a series of vehicles (i.e. all the Lamborghini’s in the game, the entire Ferrari’s collection and all the Exotic Cars).  In order to buy all the vehicles needed to gain all achievements in this area you must continue to play the game and build up a bank roll to spend on cars you may or may never actually use.


• Continues Play: Some games reward you for playing their game for a long period of time.  Project Gotham Racing 3 has an achievement known as “Gotham Hero” in which you gain 30GP if you play online and are selected to be on PGR3’s Gotham TV.  You cannot simply go into the game click a button and get 30GP; you have to continue to play until you’re randomly chosen for TV time.  Madden NFL ’06 has an achievement known as “Complete 30 Years of Franchise” and it requires you to play the game for a long extended period of time (even simulating the 30 years of game play takes hours).


• Milestones: The easiest gamer points to receive are those based on gaming milestones.  Kameo gives you 20GP for finding different Elemental Warriors throughout the game, and 100GP for saving key characters from the arms of the enemy.  These milestones are not avoidable if you play the game through to the end.  They simply give you a reward for doing your job and saving the world from the clutches of evil.


• Online Play: Some gamer points can only be gained if you play online with other people or Co-Op with friends.  This is true with Project Gotham Racing 3, Kameo, Joust, Dead or Alive and others.  A very creative marketing idea to pressure users into buying an Xbox Live account!  This also pressures the reclusive gamer to try their hand against other humans and become an interactive semi-social being.


• Developer Satisfaction: The developers have invested time and energy into each part of the game and they want you to invest time and energy playing it even if you do not find it exactly interesting.  This category covers all parts of a game that a normal gamer probably doesn’t care about but will play simply to gain achievements.  This is popular in Project Gotham Racing 3 where they make you run time trial races against yourself to get a top lap score (which occurs 100% of the time if you’ve never run the track before).  Or by taking photographs in different towns on different tracks.  Realistically nobody cares to do all this “grunt work” but if it fetches you 20GP then you’ll do it just to do it, right?  I did.

I believe at least 60% of all Xbox 360 achievements can be gained by the casual gamer. You will find that certain games make it easier or require less skill to fetch a large number of gamer points (i.e. Madden NFL ’06 all achievements can be unlocked on ‘easy’ if you so desire). Other games like Call of Duty 2 gives you 2 whole achievements for completing the game on regular mode. A hardcore and persistent gamer can complete all Call of Duty 2 achievements by running the game in “veteran” mode from start to finish.

It’s all about the stat’s baby!

Let’s focus on the gamer that goes out of their way to have the best statistics in any game they play. They want to be a master of the game and they want the world to know it. The Xbox 360 achievement system is perfect for this because it lets you compare apples to oranges!

Joe Bob may have 4,000 GP and his buddy Billy Bob only has 3,400 GP. Joe Bob is a master gamer and Billy bob is just a wanna-be, right? Right! Considering Joe Bob is a sports genre gamer and can obtain almost 3,000 GP by playing through three EA Sports games and then rents another five games and achieves only 20% all the given achievements for each game. Joe Bob only owns four games and has completed all the achievements on his first three and recently went out and purchased a new game and has 400GP on that one. The magic of “apple to orange” comparison is that it simply does not matter because statistics are statistics and Joe Bob has more numbers.

The Xbox 360 website (http://www.xbox.com/) allows you to view your achievements and compare your achievements to other gamers. This allows you to see game per game breakdowns to how you stack up against the competition. If your buddy has the “Platinum Champion” achievement in Project Gotham Racing 3 and you only have “Bronze Champion” the chances are he/she will destroy you in an online racing competition because he has invested much more of his/her blood sweat and tears into the game.

The addiction

Most casual gamers like me will probably find the 360 achievement system as baseline for deciding if a game is “complete” or not. You can win Call of Duty 2 in regular mode and be satisfied with this lofty task. On any other gaming platform I would call the game “beat” by achieving the end of game credits. But not so with the 360 achievement system! Why? Because 2 out of 13 achievements (finished “training camp” and beat the game on normal gives you 2 achievements) is not, in my mind, considered “beat” by any stretch of the imagination. If I master this game on veteran level I will have truly defeated this game and would feel proud and satisfied with my gaming experience.

This new gamer score system allows one to remove the concept of “beat” based on playing a game until there is no more game to play. Your replay value rises, your need to find all the hidden secrets goes up, and finding challenge where there was never a challenge (try defeating a hard level with a pistol rather then a chain gun and you’ll see the difficulty). All this extra effort is applied simply because a development team has put goals and milestones on a game that go far beyond simply “beating it.”

You cannot always put a game on the shelf to collect dust knowing you have only satisfied 10% of its expectations!

Historical Documentation

How many of us can say to others: “Zelda? Oh yeah, I beat that back in ’87.” A true gamer has spent countless hours toiling through the dark depths of gaming. Beaten Mother Brain, saved Princess Peach, or found the Red Ring. Yet all we have now are recollections of such great victory. Fireside talk and great stories of challenges overcome and victories obtained. All that is in the past…

…until now. The Xbox 360 achievements are part of your Xbox 360 profile (even for silver account holders). You can look back and see your “Bankshot Champion” achievement in Bankshot Billiards 2, or your “Bling” achievement from collecting 10 treasure chests on Xbox Live in Gauntlet. You can show your friends and compare your past experiences with one another. You have documented proof of your victories with a web browser in hand, and in years you can look back at your twenty games and say to yourself “1000 of 1000 and 20,000 gamer points – I am a true gaming master.”

“Jedi Master you will be when high gamer score you have.” –Master Yoda

A true gamer is one that masters all game genres and has defeated all challenges. In past years you could simply talk the talk now you can provide evidence of your masterful gaming prowess, your aptitude to overcome all obstructions, and documented evidence of achievements! To stand up and scream “I am the übergamer and you are simply my pawn!!”

--CodeMonkey