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I have a recent fascination with the thought and background work that goes into games.
As part of the fascination I was reading Tale of Tales - a post about achievements and I quote:
I find myself strangely fascinated by the recent trend of Achievements in games. For the uninitiated, achievements are a sort of titles that you get when you have done a particular thing in a videogame for the first time (like collect the Six Sacred Stones or run very fast into a wall, etc). So you don’t get a power-up or gold or points or extra lives or anything that influences the gameplay at all. Only the title. The reason for my fascination is that it seems like achievements can turn anything into a game!
OK. So lets recap. you have a game, in which you have goals to achieve - or in other worlds - places to be things to do, and you are playing this game inorder to acomplish your goal.
Why would you side track yourself with something that doesn’t get you to where you want to go. I am not sure that when I play I want to wonder around aimlessly (it seem pretty aimless to me.) I do love wondering around aimlessly, but in real life.
I can see where achievments would be a good thing though, and that would be in a game that has no specific goals or is not being played against anything.
Say, an overall experience game which you play for the sake of whatever it is that is put in your path, you begin when you want and end the game in the same fashion.
Then I could see achievements working real well, but not in games where slaying, capturing and looting are the point.
When read the post, on Tale of Tales, Do yourself a favor and read the comments as well.
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You’re absolutely correct. But, as you will find out if you read some more on our blog, we are personally not interested in games with goals. In fact, we think goals and the entire game structure of challenge-effort-reward are distracting and are holding back the evolution of videogames into a real medium.
The interesting thing about Achievements is that they are trivial and superficial. This is a good thing because as such they do not interfere with the real content of a game.
Of course, if the real content of the game is saving a princess, winning a race or destroying your enemies -things that are easy to express in terms of game goals and game rules- then Achievements probably are distracting. On the other hand, they can offer people who are not particularly interested in jumping around hacking and slashing, another way to enjoy the game, another way to play. And there can never be enough ways of playing.
You know what - if you put it that way. Most of the games today do deal with hacking people up and saving princesses and it is nice to know that there are other things out their. Other than second life - most of the long games that I have run into are the slashing kind in one way or another. Its good to know that there is a serious alternative.