The Xbox 360 experience, part three: Achievements and player motivation

In my previous posts, I discussed several of the key elements of what I’ve come to associate with the “Xbox 360 experience” – the tech and the downloadable content – and how those things have affected the spectrum of gameplay on the console. The last thing I’m going to discuss involves the console’s most trivial feature, yet it is a feature that is known well by Xbox gamers everywhere. Its signature “bloop” is unmistakeable – so simple, yet its almost retro combination of frequencies can pierce blaring gunfire to settle upon the jaded player’s ears and sweep waves of elation upon him. The words “Achievement unlocked” are sweeter to some than confessions of love from a high school crush. Entire websites and communities have developed around procuring these elusive and addicting drugs.

Some of you reading this may not have an Xbox 360, or some insane, small portion of you 360 users may have been completely oblivious to the popup messages that keep appearing during your game. So what are achievements? Achievements are various badges that are awarded to a player’s account for “achieving” various, predetermined accomplishments, such as a certain number of kills in multiplayer or passing particular levels at the different difficulty settings. Each obtained achievement has an associated numeric value, the sum of which is known as a player’s “gamerscore”. The gamerscore, along with player’s avatar, gamertag (i.e. name), and reputation, are the prominent features on a player’s gamer profile. (Okay, Microsoft, we get it – we’re gamers). Aside from the bragging rights, though, the achievements serve no lasting functional purpose (yet).

But it was by no accident that Microsoft snuck this seemingly insignificant feature onto their newest console. They knew they were dumping chunks of bloody meat into an ocean of sharks. You see, men have this thing for competition. And they will seek any way in which they can distinguish themselves from each other, whether it be the newest car, the coolest clothes, or the latest hairstyle. Gamerscore is the new fuel to the fire that drives man to dominate over his fellow man. What about the women? I wouldn’t put it far from them to have similar urges. After all, pride and covetousness are not exclusively male vices. Regardless, the deed has been done, and Microsoft’s clever little system is making waves in what should have been isolated pools.

The controversy behind achievements is not a new one. The points I’m about to make, though viewed from my personal experience and perspective, are not unique and have been cited in much older articles. By writing about it, I am simply stressing that those old arguments do, indeed, have some credibility.

Microsoft probably had innocent intentions with the 360’s achievement feature. It sounds great on paper – add extra distinguishments to players that play their games more intently and more seriously. It should have been a completely orthogonal experience – I play the game the way the usually do, and, “Oh look – I have this badge that says I beat the game! Neato! Let me show my friends!” That would’ve been ideal in my mind. Unfortunately, things are not all that nice and simple. Achievements have become so central to the Xbox that player motivations have been drastically altered, having significant repercussions on the very way that players go about playing their games. Aside from my half-baked accusation pointed at human nature, I cannot really explain the draw of the achievement system, but I can and will explain the fallout of this permeating pseudo-game.

The most likely intention of Microsoft’s innovation was probably to easily and “cheaply” add replay value to every game on the console by giving players a strong incentive to experience every nook and cranny – everything the game has to offer. The idea is simple and actually quite genius – with supposedly little work from individual developers, the achievement system itself adds additional, persistent rewards for simply playing a game – and with additional reward comes added value. With every game making use of achievements, even if a player didn’t like a particular game, there’d be something they can take from it. There would be that little, extra “umph” to push the player’s perceived value of a game to the retail price point, prompting more purchases and more money for Microsoft’s coffers. What ended up happening was, to some extent, no surprise to Microsoft. Players became hungry for achievements. Starving, even. Microsoft revelled in its creation, not realizing it had created a monster – the achievement system had stepped over the delicate divide between platform and software, between publisher and developer. The system had taken a level of global control over the design of its games by drastically altering player motivation.

By being subject to an overarching achievement system, player motivation is shifted to some extent from the game experience to the achievements that can be obtained from the experience. This is often completely opposite to the traditional developer intention of immersing the player in a self-contained world. Ideally, the game developer alone is tasked with controlling the different stimuli reaching the player – stimuli that dictate or have a strong influence over what the player is likely to do in particular situations, what the player is meant to feel at certain parts of the narrative, and general flow of game progression. The achievement system, by imposing rewards outside of the context of the game, forces the developer to relinquish some of this control. With player motivation in such a haphazard state, behavioral anamolies begin to occur when the achievement system conflicts with the fundamental design of the game. Some anamolies I’ve personally experienced are:

• forcing myself to experience parts of a game in which I am entirely uninterested. In the drive to acquire as many achievement points as possible, I’ll find myself trudging through bonus levels, dull game modes, harder (and easier) difficulty settings, and tacked-on multiplayer (see my first post as to why it’s there in the first place).
• replaying the game. Even if I felt enough closure after the first time through, I’m often tempted to play through the single-player game again if there were more achievements to be had.
• altering choices to optimize achievement gain. While I would normally take a “middle ground” approach to branching gameplay/narrative paths, I’ll often make the “extreme” choices for the sake of getting the one-sided achievements.
• “looking ahead” – by this, I refer to the action of peeking at the achievement requirements to discern what action to take at certain points in the game before I’ve even reached them. For example, if some achievement requires that I complete a level/mission without killing a single foe, I will see that achievement beforehand and make an extra effort to fulfill those conditions when I finally encounter that level.
• ignoring the story. If achievements become a tempting enough focal point, the story takes a backseat.
• ignoring the gameplay. If doing boring, lower-tier move A nets me X achievement points, while doing super-awesome, higher-tier move B nets me none, I’d probably end up doing lots of A instead of B.

There are two things the developer can do to counteract the change in player motivation: 1) employ “secret achievements”, or 2) design around the achievement system. The easiest thing the developer can do is to make all of their achievements “secret achievements”. Achievements of this type remain in complete anonymity until the player happens upon the trigger conditions, at which point it is shown in its entirety – name, condition, and all. This is almost identical to the ideal situation that I made mention of toward the beginning of this post. However, there a couple of problems with this method. The first problem is that, for some reason that I won’t explore now, in contexts that involve multiple players as opposed to a single-player experience, it becomes more “acceptable” to seek hidden information outside of the game. Is it just me that thinks that way? I would claim (just from personal experience) that browsing through a FAQ before completing a game is generally frowned upon, but looking at sites like Thottbot and GuildWiki for MMO’s is often acceptable practice and not considered “cheating”. Since achievements are primarily a means of comparing multiple players, players hardly hesitate to look up secret achievement conditions and point values online. The second problem is that secret achievements do provide some lingering information about themselves – namely, that they exist. Secret achievements are labelled as such in the game’s achievement list, as opposed to being completely invisible in the first place. Even if they were completely invisible until they were unlocked, it’s a well known fact by now that every green box game offers 1000 achievement points (excluding downloadable content) and every XBLA game offers 200. So until the player’s achievement total for the game reaches those maximum numbers, the player will know that there are other achievements to be had. If the player knows there are missing achievements, then the player’s motivation will be altered to some extent, causing any or all of the aforementioned behaviors. The only reasonable response to this is to allow developers to determine how many achievements (and points) their game can dole out. Unfortunately, the value of said achievements have become great enough to devalue games that don’t give the player the opportunity to obtain the maximum allowable number of achievement points.

Since we’ve established that secret achievements can never really stay secret, the only alternative is for the developer to design around the achievements. They must be careful to avoid a variety of possible problems: revealing plot twists too early (eg. “kill the best friend who betrays you halfway through the game”), overemphasizing unimportant gameplay elements (eg. stare at in-game ads for a total of 10 minutes), requiring too much repetition (we all know this one – beat the game on all difficulty levels, one of which is unlocked after the beating the game on a lower difficulty level), etc. Regardless, no matter how much designers design around the achievement system, the fact remains: the system invisibly and implicitly alters the underlying design to the point where designers cannot possibly achieve certain design goals with the achievement system intruding as it does. Most of the games on the Xbox embrace the achievement system nicely, but I get the feeling that the selection of games is being constricted by this system. Basically, what I’m getting at is that it’s nearly impossible for a developer to craft a serious and monolithic work of art when they have to deal with the issue of players seeing the game as just another achievement hunt. Players attempting to experience the game as a work of art would be waging a constant battle against the distractions of achievement notifications and the knowledge that they could score another achievement by doing this repetitive thing 49 more times or breezing through the “medium” difficulty so they can unlock the “insane” mode and get all of the related achievements.

Achievements are a double-edged sword. They’re great fun and extremely addicting. I’ve tasted that addiction myself. I honestly believe, however, that they’re a significant barrier to developers looking to create serious, thought-provoking games on the console. This is honestly one reason to which I can point for why I haven’t had any particularly profound experiences on the console two years into its lifetime. Here’s hoping Bioshock will be the first. But splicers aren’t going to be the only ones I need to worry about – I’ll have to be on constant watch to ensure that next hankerin’ for achievement points doesn’t consume me first.