Rules of Achievement

In today’s episode, our hero picks a fight with Harvey Smith.

The Ellustrious Mr. Smith had a post up a couple of days ago in response to this article on the Psychology of Achievements.  I’ve written before about how achievements are essentially a psychological drug, but I happened to share Harvey’s preference.  When an achievement exists that highlights an unexpected area of gameplay - e.g. getting the gnome into space - I find that really interesting and exciting.

The problem I have with Harvey’s comments is that he sees any Achievement that doesn’t encourage “the right spirit of play” to be wrong, somehow.  It’s up to game designers to create fun spaces to explore, and nudge the players in the direction of the entertainment they’ve created.  Some people are going to do what you tell them to do.  Some people are going to build ladders out of proximity mines and escape your little world.  Some people are insane completionists and mostly just care about getting every achievement you provide them with.

And there’s a LOT of those people.

You don’t have to like that fact, but if you don’t cater to those people at all, then they’ll play something else.  Just because you enjoy open-ended game experiences doesn’t mean the entire world is looking for them.

That said, I think there’s ways to structure acheivements (or Trophies, or whatever) in a way that can satisfy most people:

The Rules

For the Explorers

• Force the player to change the way they play the game.
• Create a trail into a gameplay space that might go unnoticed.
• Example: Essentially any game by Valve

For the Achievers

• Reward completing sets of things
• Reward maximizing or minimizing variables (do this without dying, get the highest level in that)
• Example: Bioshock

For the Socializers

• Do Nothing!
• Socializers care about creating relationships, any little badge you put on that simply makes it seem trite.
• Creating “Social” Achievements will piss off your Achievers.
• Counter Example: Settlers of Catan’s “Invite X people to play with you” achievement.

For the Killers

• Do Nothing!
• Leaderboards serve this purpose already
• Creating “Killer” Achievements will piss off your Explorers.
• Counter Example: Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

For Everyone

• Make some achievements easy to get, early in the game
• Avoid tedious achievements that require you to grind for hours.
• A single playthrough of the game should net the average player around 50% of the game’s achievements

New Overlord

Somewhere along the line I missed this announcement.  Codemasters is making three new Overlord games, a sequel to the first for Xbox 360, an two new titles for the Wii and DS.  Codemasters, to you, I would like to say two things:

First, thank you for not just announcing Overlord 2 for the 360, Wii, and DS, branding all three games as the same, when really they’re totally different, as some companies I know have often done.

Secondly, the first game was highly amusing, but if you put in achievements that require me to grind myself retarded, again, I will be extremely displeased.  You make your game worse by doing this.  Cut it the fuck out.

Blizzard’s Multi-Game Achievements

As if Blizzard’s games weren’t addictive enough, in the upcoming Wrath of the Lich King expansion for WoW, they’re adding achievements.  Okay, old news.

Blizzard told MTV Multiplayer’s Jeff Kaplan last week that this upgrade would be the intial step in a cross-blizzard effort to create achievements across their entire game portfolio.  You’re going to have a “Blizzard Level” that is impacted by your performance, not only in WoW, but in upcoming titles like Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2.

And this is how the universe ends.

Linked Achievements

David Edery (whom you may know as the Portfolio Planner for Xbox Live Arcade) has an interesting post up about CliffyB’s announcement on Gears of War 2’s achievements being linked to things you did the original. 

This got me thinking about a concept that has so far been poorly explored, likely because there hasn’t been a good platform to launch it on until relatively recently.

If you recall the first time you saw Memento, there’s an experience of having an incomplete series of events handed to you.  You’re thrust into the middle of a series of events, and the logic of how you got there, and what’s going on, don’t become entirely clear until the end.  If you’ve ever read the Vlad Taltos series of books in the order they were published, you’ll experience something similar (or for that matter, read any other series of books with a sophisticated plot, out of chronological order).

It would be interesting to reproduce this sensation in game format - by having a series of games with linked content, as David describes.  Instead, however, of treating this content - hidden until certain events in a sequel are unlocked - as an easter egg, use it as the core of the design process.  Imagine a game where the central concept is the corruption of a timeline.  You play through the first game, thrust into the middle of a series of events, not really understanding what’s going on.  By the end of the first game, you have a grip on the immediate scenario, but there are a lot of plot holes.  Playing the second, or third game gives you a similar experience.  However, in each of these games, there are events you can trigger which will have causal effects in one of the other games, altering a timeline either before, or after the position in which you triggered it.  This effect unlocks further content in the other games, forcing you to go back to them and play that content.  The entire experience is understood only through playing all three games, and retracing what you’ve done with significant alterations.  Another alternative would be to run parallel dimensions at concurent timelines, so that the game mechanic would be the same, but instead of altering time, you alter space.

Creating a series of titles like this would be extremely high risk - if one of the titles doesn’t get made, the entire experience is ruined.  This is a risk that nearly nobody in the gaming industry is has so far been willing to undertake - and yet in other formats, notably television, this type of risk scenario is now common-place.  The risk could be mitigated by making the titles digital distributed at a lower price point through something like Xbox Live Arcade, and by using a common infrastructure such that most of the risk is entertained in the first title, and it will cost significantly less to make titles 2 and 3 (assuming a trilogy).

Now if only there were a large games company with significant financial backing that was trying to do something progressive and could afford to entertain some risk…

Gamerpoints vs Achievements

I’m going to have to throw this one over to my fellow Canuck, Nerfgun.  As previously mentioned, I’m quite the dainty trollop when it comes to achievements.  There’s something quite sadly affirmating about having the game pat you on the head and give you an A+ sticker.  Must be a Gen Y thing.

I hadn’t really given much consideration to the fact that Gamerscore and Achievements are not one and the same.  In theory the point value attached to a given achievement should indicate the relatively level of difficulty for earning that achievement.  However, at the end of the day, it would appear there is no actual policy regarding how difficult something should be for a given number of points.

 And really, that’s impossible to dictate globally, because there are some games that are just easy.  A raw gamerscore doesn’t really tell you anything about the skill of a player, it just theoretically tells you how much time they spend playing Xbox 360 games.  I’m not even sure that’s true, actually - Gabe and I have nearly the same Gamerscore, and I hear he plays video games like it’s his job.

No Xbox Originals Achievements Either

I’m going to get one last one in before the DNS throws up.

Major Nelson reports that Xbox Originals aren’t going to have achievements either.  So essentially buying the game digitally will be like having a buggy version of the disc version of the game with no achievements and random crashing when you chose menu options that you shouldn’t have chosen because you’re a stupid fuck who’s not psychic (apparently). 

“These are the original games that were created before Xbox 360. In order to preserve the integrity of the original gaming experience they provide, they will have the features available at the time of their initial release”

That’s some marketing bullshit that means “We don’t want to go into the source code and modify the game because it costs more to do that, so you’re going to get a sloughed out half-experience instead”.  Achievement points cannot possibly destroy the integrity of the original gaming experience.  This is one of the only modifications you could make that would be a no risk gain.  I don’t even see a scenario around this product anymore. 

There’s an opportunity to leverage the existing platform of awesomeness and bring it up to a new level.  Developers in general are happy to release their game on more platforms if the cost is low to them.  I would expect most would be more than happy to spend a month reworking their code to operate in this environment and add achievement points to their games.  It gives people a really good reason to replay those games they once loved and to buy them through this channel instead of getting them for ten bucks used at the local GameStop.  You guys do know that you don’t get paid when people buy used games, yeah?

By feeding your customers the raw scraps from the table in an attempt to make a quick cash grab you’re hurting your brand.  Xbox Live has become a touchstone and a symbol of multiplayer gaming.  Watering down that symbol with buggy content, or rechurn of games at a lower quality than their original incarnation burns your brand.  This will result in less money long term.  Do it right, or don’t do it at all.

Kongregate

Kongregate will consume your soul and cause you to swear Oaths of Fealty.

As mentioned previously, I’m a huge achievement whore.  The concept of badges has entranced me since I was a wee Boy Scout.  I don’t take particular pride in showing them off to anyone, I just like having a record of tasks I’ve accomplished.  If you’re a fan of Newgrounds, which is the cradle of humanity for cool flash games, you’re going to lurrrrve Kongregate. 

Additionally, and this bit is kind of weird, Kongregate is the future home of a digital collectable card game.  The current manner for aquiring these cards is to complete an acheivement for a particular game for that week.  Presumably when the game is actually launched there will also be some mechanism for purchasing/winning additional cards for your deck.  Final judgement is reserved for when the game comes out.

On top of all that, It’s just clean.  Clean like Facebook used to be, you know, back in the day before they started plastering shit all over your screen like this was 1997.  Cleanliness is highly appreciated and improves the usability story tenfold.  Go check it out.

My name is Angus, and I’m an Achievement Whore

1. Achievement Points
2. ???
3. Profits!!! 

Apparently the EEDAR has figured out that acheivements points are good.  This has been apparent to basically anyone who owns a 360 since the dawn of time, but it’s nice to see in an official looking report.  The report says that Metacritic scores go way up on titles which have a large number of achievement points, as well as a larger variety.  Games which have online achievement points generate 50% more income than those who do not.  Furthermore, a user will prefer to buy a title on platform which as acheivement points (I know I do, if it’s on the 360, I get it on the 360).  A more interesting finding is that if you have achievement points which include a viral marketing component, or some type of content creation, profit is on average 50% higher.

An acheivement is a very powerful reward scheme, because unlike gameplay mechanisms, you can only unlock it once, and that’s it, forever.  Each point is also unique, they are not generic rewards such as extra lives.  What this means is you remember rewards you get, especially if the mechanism in which you got it was particularly offbeat and unique (e.g. hitting the guard with the can he tells you to pick up in Half-Life 2, or taking a picture of Spencer Cohen’s body in Bioshock).  Furthermore the points themselves extent their reach in the other direction as well, by demonstrating your glorious victories to your friends through Xbox live (which cleverly has badges which sync to the system available for facebook and blogs).

Update: A clever assertion by Raph Koster:

Well, yeah. I’m one of the people who went out there and said, “Single-player gaming is doomed,” and I actually used that phrase. An Xbox Live Achievement is a soul-bound item, and Gamerpoints are experience points, and BioShock is a one-man instance dungeon in the Xbox Live MMO. That is the direction that single-player gaming is going, frankly.

Having a larger variety of interactive tasks therefore incentivizes your players to keep exploriIng the world you’ve crafted.  Strategic use of an achievement can introduce a player to an entirely new area of exploration that they may not have considered.  A player will start by picking the low hanging fruit when they try your game, and indeed it’s good to have some early hand-outs, but the fruit is sweet, and as long as you don’t make it impossible to get more of them (I’m looking at you Burnout), they will keep coming back for more.  Eventually they turn into freakish, bizarre creatures like myself, who will stay up to all hours of the morning, killing peasants over and over again because I need more Minions to squeeze 10 more little fetid GP out of your game with my clammy, blistered hands, cackling to the moonlight as I go.  By the way, as a general rule, do not make achievement points which require hours of repetitive action, it isn’t fun, and actually detracts from an otherwise highly entertaining game.

What this means is that the rewards structure of achievement points, while in a sense existing ‘outside the magic circle’, in effect has impact on the game itself, and should therefore be considered as part of the design, not merely an afterthought (as it seems to be in many titles).  So to all you developers out there, do a good job, hire Tim Schaefer to plan your Achievement strategy if you must, but give it serious consideration.  If anyone needs me, I’ll be trying to nail the rest of the gold medals on Portal.