Community Intelligence – Achievement points and Trophies have changed gaming forever!
Posted on : 02-03-2010 | By : Tony Atkins | In : Articles
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The idea of the segment is to give you the community a chance to have a voice on our show, but in a far more interesting way than just listener mail. We dedicate the last few minutes of certain shows covering a topic that we set out for you. This will normally have some correlation with what we will be discussing on the following week’s show.
There is one simple rule: -
Keep your answers short as long essays are hard to do justice to.
Now how is this going to work? Well, we give you four options: -
• The first is you can leave a voicemail via Skype, name Digitalcowboys
• Leave a comment on our website at www.thedigitalcowboys.com
• Send us an email on mailbag@digitalcowboys.com
• Or lastly, leave a post under the dedicated forum thread
So it’s time to set out the topic for you for this week’s show. We will be covering Achievements this week and the question that I pose to you thus: -
Achievement points and Trophies have changed gaming forever!
Some people love them and some people hate them but tell us what you think and we shall read it out on the show
So there we go you’ve got your assignment for the week and we look forward to hearing your comments and this is open to any followers of the Digital Cowboys, so podcasters, PR Persons but most importantly, the general community.
“Have achievements and trophies changed gaming forever?”
Although the purist game collector in me wants to say NO; the game enthusiast in me says YES.
I can only talk of my own experience, but I have found myself either: playing games I would never have bought before (see My Horse and Me 2 review http://bit.ly/xanmham) or getting more value from a game by trying for a particular achievement challenge.
If used well, achievements and trophies can be used:
- to enhance the gameplay experience;
- to act as a method of teaching you how to play (encourage particular behaviours)
- to reward players for exploration and progress
- to get the most out of a purchase
The main problem with achievements and trophies is that the system is open to abuse and exploitation, either though:
- cheating – hacking or otherwise;
- misinterpretation -your total gamescore is more like XP rather than skill; or
- game breaking – such as people playing online games just for the achievements and ruining the balance/experience.
You know that achievements and trophies have changed the landscape when you consider that it now affects people buying decisions. I’ve no doubt that part of the reason that the Wii suffers from weaker enthusiast’s game sales is because of the lack of reward incentive that the other platforms offer the player who owns both consoles. As I have mentioned on Twitter, you have to make the effort to play the Wii and wean yourself off earning trophies and achievements for a few days.
HTH
…Gary (Xan)
Well it’s fair to say I’m rather enjoying them, both on the 360 and the PS3. Achievements were something new to me when I hopped onboard the good ship console fully in 2008. However, as mentioned in others thoughts on the forums, I soon realised they were mainly either an indication of how far through a game I had reached, or a medal for having done something that in the past might have given you an in game item of special worth or some such.
However I am constantly debating with myself about how I prefer them to be.
Sometimes I’m thinking all achievements should be secret as I get a special joy from receiving an achievement without realising what I was doing would gain me any such thing. And they shouldn’t be for completing chapters, though maybe for completing the game.
Then other times I’ll find myself with one secret achievement left and it will do my head in that I don’t know what it is, and demand of the gaming gods to remove all secret achievements in existence.
In the main I find they have the ability to open up the true enjoyment of a game beyond what I would have otherwise gotten out of it. Case in point; Pure. Nice little dirt buggy game which I played a little and would finish high enough to unlock the next event and move on. Along game our gamerscore challenge and I said “Right, let’s see if I can max out my points on this game” And so I sat down and really had to play the game to get 1st place on all events. The skills required to do so where a vastly different to those required just to progress in the game, and taking that time to eak every last second out of a lap time, and hit all the jumps to the best of my ability filled me with such a thrill that it was like a completely different game.
All in all, done right these little baubles can lead you into a far deeper and more enjoyable game. Done poorly they are but tinsel on an already gaudy Christmas tree.