The other day I was at my job (for the record I hate my job), and my boss was talking to me about numbers that the store was making. To make his point, he started off his lecture with "you're a gamer right?", as I stared at him with much restraint. In my head I was thinking, "you have no idea how far games have come...."
After giving it a bit of thought, my boss was still right. Video games are still all about getting our initials on that proverbial scoreboard in the sky. It's all completely pointless, when the medium has come as far as it has. Simply by having point values to these games, it trivializes all that happens in them. Achievements and Trophies are worthless.
Games like, Last of Us, The Walking Dead, Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and Bioshock all have amazing stories that engage the player in a way that no other game has ever achieved. All of these games are critically acclaimed, and for good reason, about the way that they tell their story. Yet, each one comes with a set of pointless achievements and trophies for the player to try and attain.
No one cares about your gamer score, all that is, is a quantitative way to keep track of how much of a life that you don't have. So what if you have all of the achievements for game X. I played game X, and I enjoyed it very much. I feel as though I got the full experience from it, and I still keep it around because the multiplayer is still fun to play every once in a while. Just because you have more achievements unlocked for the game doesn't make you better than me, or that you like it more.
Some would say that having achievement, and the like, in video games helps to extend the life of a video game. They suggest new things for the player to try out, and discover. This is true, but only for a certain extent. Games have a lot more than what the achievements offer to them. Say that a game has lots of achievements, and it is the person's only game: of course they will play the game to death, and will most likely score every achievement possible. Though, they will also explore other aspects of the game that were not considered during the development process or the achievement inception. People are more clever than what game developers give them credit for. Games are so linear these days that even experimentation has winstates. Achievements leave nothing up to the imagination, and instead of becoming a personal challenge, everything becomes a point value. It wasn't by my courage that I chose to take on Mass Effect 2 on the hardest difficulty, but because I wanted to get that achievement, because "why not?" I love Mass Effect 2, and it's on my top 5 list of games of all time, but I just kind of ran out of things to do with it. I did explore every nook and cranny of that game, and all that was left to do was to get all of the achievements. I've done some pretty amazing stuff in that game, that I can't really claim to anymore because no one would believe me. If there was an achievement for hooking an enemy on the other side of a wall with a biotic pull, people would see that. I would have validation.
Perhaps that is a reason as to why people achievement hunt. To be able to back up their arguments of their feats of awesomeness. I suppose that I would have no other way to prove to you that I did everything that one can possibly do in a particular video game other than to show you my gamerscore. Then again, who cares? I think what matters is that you or I played the game and enjoyed it.
Playing video games is fun. I enjoy them, and I want to share them with everyone. I don't want to intimidate others with my gamerscore, though I often show them up with my skill in video games. However, that's only because I've played so many, but I digress. Achievements and Trophies are pointless because they get in the way of what the game should be, or how they could be perceived by their audience. Games have come a long way, they can tell stories that empower us, or break our hearts, and we don't need a score to tell us how much we enjoyed that.
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