“Achievement” Unlocked

Congratulations! You just pissed into the wind! You gain 5 achievement points! Seriously, it's coming to this. Achievements can only be described as an insidious creation by some genius marketing hivemind. It decided the best way to make money was to stop trying and give players what they want. Apparently they decided that what we want is numbers, and lots of them. All I can say is that boy did they deliver. We're now mired in a numerology that is insipid and generally hateful to original creation and ideas. The idea that difficulty is something expressed in numbers has never been a good idea. Sure, a danmaku game can put an infinite curtain of bullets on the screen, but there's no way to measure a player's ability to weave through them all. We know however, that some can do it, and it's impressive because it's difficult. The same could be said for Demon's Souls. We know it's difficult. The simplicity of the mechanics that we see belies a discipline within these games.

Demon's Souls is not a difficult game to understand. It's about slaying your enemies ruthlessly and efficiently. But while that's a common premise, achieving results in Demon's Souls is no small task. You know something becomes an achievement when it has that level of difficulty. When you begin to breathe heavily as the demon breathes in hellfire, full of sound fury, seeking to pummel your fragile human body. It's about learning that the player is not God. That's a lesson games all too often forget. You do not need to satisfy the player all the time to engage the player. The sweat dripping down the player's neck while they're fighting that impossible beast, that's engaging the player. They aren't simply tuned into the game, they are not simply there. In that moment, they are with that imaginary world, and with it the developer now has them in their grasp. When that player finally takes up their weapon and smashes down on that demon, they are a torrent upon the foe. When that player conquers the enemy as they flail to the ground and when that player breathes a sigh of relief, that is when you have done your job as a developer. Because you know you didn't need an achievement to get them to immerse themselves. You provided them a feeling that no trophy, no fifty points could give them. You gave them an experience.

That is what so many games are not interested in today, and achievements have made the problem much, much worse. Games must bring a challenge to the player that is real, and the player must rise to meet it. I say rise because that is what they must do. It must be beyond their initial ability in a real way. They must develop a skill set to meet the challenges that are presented by the game. Some might think that achievements or carrots can aid in doing this, but that's simply poor game design. Any real achievement is often so difficult as to be termed impossible before it is achieved. That is the nature of an achievement. Unfortunately, an achievement in Demon's Souls is both for defeating a boss and for leveling up a weapon to its maximum power. One is difficult, one is not. Leveling a weapon takes little more than time. That's really illustrative of what achievements are in the way games see them. Time is the means by which a game tends to measure "achievement." Simply turning on a game, often, the very act of giving "time" to a game is measured as being worthy of an "achievement" by some games. It does a disservice to those who have done things that are genuinely difficult and also robs the player of being able to find their own achievements.

The system is arbitrary, and as with most arbitrary systems, effectively worthless. In the case of videogame achievements, I would argue that it actually detracts from the experience. Defeating certain Black Phantoms in Demon's Souls felt like an achievement to me, but the game's not going to give me achievements for them. On the other hand, collecting all the feathers in Assassin's Creed 2 or mining all the moons in Mass Effect 2 felt like a boring, lifeless romp around the game world. But they were "achievements," (I prefer the term time sink) and being the completionist that I am, I did them anyway. Achievements are a bit like poison. They are slow to act, but become more effective and pervasive the longer they're around. They rob the player of actual accomplishment because the player now needs confirmation that they achieved something. There's no encouragement for the player to set their own goals. What's worse is that sometimes achieving something early on in the game can ruin the rest of the game, as completing certain achievements early on make the rest of the game trivial.

Achievements occlude difficulty in favor of time sinks that are made precisely to make the player feel like they got their money's worth. The reality is that what they got was a lazy developer who couldn't get the player to feel anything. Lacking that, it has instead become easier to fill the game with mini-games that aren't called mini-games, with achievement runs that don't really look like they're achieving a whole lot, and robbing the player of free thought. We need games like Demon's Souls, because they challenge us to challenge ourselves. In today's market that's not the norm, that's a unique feature to a game. What's worse is that videogames are extensions of older games (think chess), all of which are based on the simple principle that challenge is what keeps players with games. What's unique and great about videogames, is they need not merely challenge us at the mechanical level. Indeed, Demon's Souls does invite a rather profound challenge at its end, a question of life and death that most would likely be unwilling to answer without a FAQ. That knowledge saddens me deeply, because we have become so focused on being the best in games that we cannot be ourselves. Videogames have a unique opportunity to let us approach ourselves in ways which can evoke the profundity of human emotion, but are instead satisfied with goals of immediacy, as achievements and their subsequent popularity so aptly demonstrate. So the next time you get an achievement, remember who's giving you that gold star. Ask yourself if you really want it, if you really need it, or if you're tired of being treated like you're seven.