Game achievements have come to affect our favorite pastime on many levels. A far cry from the high-score lists of our youth, adorned with the initials of our fellow arcade denizens, the creation of predefined in-game goals have led to obsessive collection of PlayStation Network trophies and Xbox LIVE Gamerscore alike. Achievements are being added to a growing list of game genres, from the simplest casual puzzler to gargantuan industry standards like World of Warcraft. Their rise is leading to raging debates on both industry and enthusiast fronts: What in-game objectives ought to merit achievements? How can games best be designed with achievements (and achievers) in mind? What further rewards can be tied to achievements to enhance their effective use in games? How much worth do game achievements truly have? In order to better approach these and other questions, GameCyte consulted Rene Weber, a professor of psychology and telecommunications, and Patrick Shaw, a game designer/developer, who recently collaborated to research and define player types and motivations in modern gaming. Weber and Shaw offered us their considerable expertise in order to examine why game achievements have become such a vital part of our gaming experience.
The idea of achieving something within a video game is nothing new, nor is the idea of publicizing that achievement. The high score has been around for as long as games have had points, and once games began to evolve into structured experiences with linear objectives, gamers have been able to boast about completing said tasks. It was not uncommon to hear a boast about completing Super Mario Bros. without using warp zones, or collecting all of the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic the Hedgehog. For as long as there have been obstacles to overcome, gamers have been crowing -- privately and publicly -- about their in-game exploits.
As gaming grew more popular and the playing field began to fill with more capable competitors, the bragging increased as well, both in form and function. When it became clear to competitive players that simply beating a game was no longer enough to differentiate themselves, the gamers themselves began to define new, harder objectives and qualifying criteria, leading to the advent of hyper-competitive pursuits like speedrunning, or completing epic-length games without continuing, and so on. As a result, as the boasts grew more and more impressive and outlandish, they were matched by rising skepticism from one's fellow gamers. Anybody could claim they had beaten the second quest in Zelda, but such claims were soon rebuffed with demands for proof. Soon, gamers were taking photos of their TV screens to verify high scores or crucial in-game moments. Game creators and media began to come on board with this new trend of in-game excellence, offering prizes for especially notable achievements: Nintendo Power awarded readers with T-shirts and stickers for high score photos, while arcade titles like S.T.U.N. Runner promised a free t-shirt for players good enough to complete the final level.
The earliest example of creator-sponsored, standardized achievements, in fact, seems to predate all of these examples: As far back as the early 1980s, Activision undertook a marketing/community initiative for their library of Atari, Colecovision, and Intellivision titles. For every title Activision published at the time, the company invited players to mail in photographs when they completed certain pre-defined objectives, at which point they would receive a sew-on patch commemorating their achievement. Some objectives were score-based, while others involved playing a level to completion, but each achievement was linked to a distinct and unique patch design, and an enterprising and skilled gamer could theoretically collect the full set. These patches appear to be the first appearance of game achievements as we know them today: abstract, collectible representations of in-game merit, whose presence is separate from the gameplay yet intertwined with the experience as an extra motivator and/or novelty. What's more, Activision had the prescience to enact this new form of meta-gaming -- the collection and sharing of achievements -- back during a time when home video gaming was still very much in its infancy, roughly 20 years before the appearance of Xbox LIVE.
Soon afterwards, the arrival of online leaderboards and profiles would allow gamers to confirm their expertise to a global community, so that their achievements could be known and respected by gamers who might be too far away to see their T-shirts. Today, achievements range from the nebulous Gamerscores of Xbox LIVE, to excited speculation about how to unlock Team Fortress 2 weapons, to bragging rights, beta-testing privileges, and even real-world prizes on Kongregate. Developers are coming up with new and exciting ways to implement achievements into their games every day, which in turn draws more and more players into the camp of achievement-obsessed "completionist" gamers.
We've all seen the effects at work. Achievements, to a gamer who enjoys, appreciates, or obsesses over them, can turn a good game experience into a great one -- or even make a bad experience tolerable enough to warrant further play time. But why is this true? Pursuing a high score or seeing a linear game to completion are fun all by themselves; why is the experience enhanced when a little flag pops up to tell us we've unlocked an officially-recognized achievement? To delve deeper into this phenomenon, we spoke with Rene Weber and Patrick Shaw of Michigan State University.
Rene Weber, a current professor at MSU and UC Santa Barbara, is a frequently invited reviewer for academic papers on video games. A Ph.D. in psychology and an M.D. in cognitive neuroscience, Weber is currently researching the cognitive and emotional effects of new technology media. His recent work has involved a specific focus on video games, having co-written such papers as "Character Attachment in Role-playing Video Games," as well as a highly-read article entitled "Does Playing Violent Video Games Induce Aggression? Empirical Evidence of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study." Weber co-authored a paper with Patrick Shaw, who holds a master's in telecommunication from MSU, and is a lead designer at Reactor Zero, a game development studio currently working on projects for the PS3 and simulations for the U.S. Military. Together, Weber and Shaw composed a paper entitled "Player Types and Game Qualities: A Model to Predict Video Game Playing."
The study utilizes Social Cognitive Theory to propose a predictive model of player types and their primary motivations for play. To better understand which motivations arose from game achievements, we asked Weber and Shaw about the "completionist" gamer -- the archetypal player who relentlessly seeks out every last task and objective within a game. We all know these gamers, or in some cases, are these gamers. We asked how common the "completionist" gamer was, in relation to the gaming populace as a whole, to which Shaw replies:
The frequency of the "completionist" gamer is unknown, especially given the diversity of potential motivations. When working with archetypes, however, it's important to remember that no one is exclusively one archetype or another. Rather, as individuals, we all fall into multiple archetypes to differing degrees.
The same explanation is offered by the Bartle Test, a questionnaire based on the works of Richard Bartle, who defined a quartet of player types as early as 1990. Weber and Shaw also refer to Bartle within their study, and it does not seem coincidental that one of the Bartle archetypes is the "achiever." Still, for those who are primarily or secondarily an achiever or completionist, what is it that makes them so? Why do we crave these unlockable treats? Weber and Shaw suggest several scenarios, offering possible explanations for a wide range of gamers:
Status with others: Completing the game to show off their skills and knowledge to their peers.
This would seem to be the most traditional game motivation in the book, mirroring the age-old quest for high scores and bragging rights. "For players driven by social motivations, achievements are a public display of their fame or infamy," writes Shaw, reminding us that Bartle's "Killer" archetype can also hunger for achievements if they reflect a measure of their game dominance.
- Status with oneself: Completing the game as a measure of personal skill.
Gamers have been striving for those 100% scores, after all, since before achievements were standardized or shared. For these gamers, writes Shaw, achievements provide "a sense of mastery over the game or a general feeling of completeness or closure." Which, in turn, leads to...
- Closure: Some players want to complete the game for a sense of closure (i.e. there is nothing more for the game to offer).
For some gamers, this can be a value proposition: Reaching a game's 100% completion point can allow them to truly know they have gotten their money's worth. For others, including Shaw, it can speak to Bartle's "Explorer" archetype. When asked about his own completionist tendencies, Shaw replied, "Depends on the game and my mood. I tend towards amassing goals and achievements when my life is more relaxed. I do so for a personal sense of accomplishment and a feeling that I've completely explored the game's design space. However, when I am more busy, I tend to focus on only finishing the game and ignore my 'completionist' tendencies."
What of open-ended games, which cannot be 100% completed? Weber and Shaw postulate that beyond any included pre-defined achievements, completionists are on their own for games like Geometry Wars or Tetris:
Based on personal experience, completionists need goals to achieve and do not enjoy open-ended game experiences. The only way that a completionist may enjoy such an experience is if they construct their own goals (i.e. maintain the top score on high score list).
It's hardly surprising, then, to see game designers adding achievements to no-ending titles like Geometry Wars, or MMORPGs like WoW, or sandbox titles like Spore.
- Monetary: The collection of awards or game items mirrors one's real world desires for material acquisition.
Apart from the general capitalist/consumer drive to "get more stuff," this may also tie in to the aforementioned value proposition: in the absence of the ability to afford more games, a gamer may instead work to acquire more rewards from the games he already owns.
- Social: The process of completion may require social interaction.
Illustrating that even Bartle's "Socializer" archetype may demonstrate completionist tendencies, Weber and Shaw remind us that when a difficult achievement is obtained, it can often make for a perfect anecdote with which to relate to our gaming peers. Shaw points out an enthusiastic discussion can begin with a simple "Hey, how did your Pikachu get so powerful?" In this way, social gamers can compare their achievements and the tales of valor involved in reaching them, relating to each other as only fellow gamers can.
- Escapist: Completing well-defined game goals compensates for stagnation and/or uncertainty in the real world.
One could say the same thing about gaming in general, of course, but Weber and Shaw's point is well-taken. For a gamer who may be going through a rough patch, it can be of some comfort to feel that they have accomplished something impressive.
Ask a gamer who enjoys achievements why he enjoys them, and chances are good he will point to one or all of the above motivations for his obsession. What's more, game developers are starting to make better and better use of these desires in their players, which has seen some truly novel design choices in recent efforts.
Of the examples that rush immediately to mind, the first involves the addition of achievements to Valve's Team Fortress 2. When TF2 first saw release as part of The Orange Box, the inclusion of achievements could be seen as the simple result of the game's release on the Xbox 360, which requires that every game in its library utilize achievements. Valve demonstrated exceptional enthusiasm for the process, however, going so far as to include an unprecedented 99 achievements across the collection, including several truly inventive entries which required gamers to play the game in unconventional ways in order to unlock them -- going through certain levels using only the physics engine-friendly gravity gun, or carrying a useless and unwieldy garden gnome through an entire game. From there, however, Valve undertook further steps to enhance the game experience through achievements.
Over the course of the next year, Valve would provide a series of updates to TF2, adding game content which would include new weapons for a few of the in-game characters. In order to obtain these weapons, however, players would have to complete a series of new achievements, specific to the class whose weapon they wished to unlock. By placing the desirable new content behind achievements, and by keeping the achievements varied and creative, Valve accomplished a unique feat of game design: the ability to require players to mix up their styles of play. Players who might not have even glanced at the updated classes before now had reason to try them out, thanks to the promise of new content -- while veteran and new players alike now had ample reason to play in different, experimental ways. By composing a list of achievements requiring the use of different weapons and centering on specific events, players would find themselves experimenting with the underused melee weapons, or using dispensers for support, or even attempting to execute some of the Medic's offensive moves. Not everyone would enjoy these new styles of play, nor stick with them once the achievements were obtained, but at least everybody would be trying something new; if nothing else, the playerbase would come away from the experiment with a greater understanding of the game and a fuller experience.
In Shaw's words, achievements represent "an extra layer of interest and value to the player," giving players a reason unto themselves to replay games and extend the life of a title. What Valve accomplished, by contrast, was something new: They added content which, by itself, would extend the life of their game, but required experimental play in order to reach them, thus compounding the effective value addition.
Another example of achievements which serve an exciting new function can be witnessed on Kongregate, a game community site revolving around casual and experimental flash games. Kongregate's features are many, but what's truly noteworthy is its implementation of achievements across a series of games with diverse, independent developers, and placing said achievements in an unlikely -- yet wonderfully supportive -- space.
Weber and Shaw have given us several reasons why achievements can function as their own reward to the right kind of gamer. What Kongregate is doing, therefore, by adding them to small, independent games which appear on their site, is delivering an instant audience to developers who might not otherwise see their games enjoying much exposure. Simply by adding a few achievements to one or two games every week, Kongregate connects a large section of its userbase -- the achievement-hungry completionists -- with clever and new games in need of players. Kongregate has dabbled with material rewards in the past, as well, but the achievements mostly stand as their own reward. Kongregate dangles this carrot in front of new submissions on a regular basis, thus calling out a choice selection of attention-deserving games which, on today's crowded internet, might otherwise never be noticed.
In this way, Kongregate's use of achievements adds value to both sides: Players are effortlessly directed towards a regular selection of new game content, and developers receive the invaluable notoriety and feedback they need.
As rich a history as achievements have, and as fascinating a potential they may someday reach, Weber and Shaw caution that "achievements by themselves cannot make up for a poor game or service." Likewise, even an enjoyable game can include some extremely poor achievements. Still, developers would be wise to continue to explore achievements as an integral part of game design for completionists and casual players alike; gamers are merely the latest in a long line of subcultures which prize the ability to share their exploits with the world. As Napoleon famously said with regards to the ceremonial medals his soldiers fought alarmingly hard to earn: "With a handful of ribbons I can conquer all of Europe." With gaming having finally arrived as a globally popular industry, the developer who spreads his ribbons wisely may yet conquer the world.
And earn 100 Gamerscore for doing so.
September 9th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Just when I thought you'd lost it and become a gaming historian, your brilliant sense of humor shines through:
"And earn 100 Gamerscore for doing so."
Bravo.