First, I have to begin this article with a disclaimer. I couldn’t care less if achievements were around or not. But I couldn’t care less if the matrix sequels were around or not and I still think they’re steaming piles of shit.
Microsoft introduced achievements as a means of encouraging people to buy cross platform games on the 360. A good idea, considering how many titles are multi-platform, as its an easy enough little ‘thing’ to stuff in a game that’s already completed. These took off like fucking hotcakes, though, and now every platform, even PCs, have them in some form. (Except the Wii, but the Wii has River City Ransom, and so, along with the NES, already won this war).
But they’re so god damned stupid. The 360s achievements improve your Gamerscore. What the fuck does that mean? It’s not an indicator of your ability at games, since the way you gain the achievement is left to the whim of the individual developer. Even if it was a general indicator of ones skill it still is a poor metric since as time goes on more games are released and thus a value that was once impressive is now paltry.
Playstation home and the 360 achievements are also supposed to be sources of “bragging rights” by showing off things you’ve done in games. But they make a critical error: assuming anyone other than the person that actually has the trophy/nick-nack/e-penis actually gives a shit (they don’t).
Recently, World of Warcraft also started using achievements seriously (you could say achievements themselves have their origins in MMO quests that handed out titles or other ‘bragging rights’ rewards), which, as one of my WoW playing friends put it “need to be better implemented into the game than just a seperate tab of random shit”, and “[is] stupid, and immersion breaking”, as the metagame achievements give out in-character reward, acting as “essentially long lists of everything you will be rewarded for and then people go out and do them”.
Of course, the only reason I wrote this at all was because I have a pathetic gamerscore. (1515)
