Arcade Berg arcade@arcadeberg.com
Achievements I have 167 Achievements and 2830 Gamerscore on my Xbox Live account. I have 13 Trophies making me a level 2 user on my Playstation Network account. I have 15 achievements from Team Fortress 2 on my Steam account. Achievements ruin the fun and freedom of playing for some, including me. I’m not saying a game is bad simply because of achievements. I’m merely of the opinion that achievements aren’t a good thing per default. They can be used as a powerful tool to enhance games but unfortunately it’s a double edged sword and I don’t think everyone is wielding it just right. I'm not offering a solution for this. All I do is trying to define some of the problems while also noting some of the positive aspects as well.
The word The phenomena of which I speak, the “achievements” has many different names depending on the community. Being it Achievements by Microsoft or Trophies by Sony, the fact remains that they are all the same thing; a pseudo‐trophy of accomplishing something in a game that is predefined by the developers. The trophy is then connected to your registered profile of the present community. In this text I’ll continuously use the term “achievement” as a union of all different communities reward‐term.
Player Types Richard Bartle writes in HEARTS, CLUBS, DIAMONDS, SPADES: PLAYERS WHO SUIT MUDS (http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm, available 29/10‐2008) about four different kinds of players. His text and classification of players are focused on playing MUD; the types however are applicable on many kinds of games. The text is also used in several Computer Game Development educations, the one I studied being one of them. The player types are Explorers, Socialisers, Killers and Achievers. I think what I’m about to present is mostly valid for the last one; Achievers. Achievers regard points‐gathering and rising in levels as their main goal, and all is ultimately subserviant to this. Exploration is necessary only to find new sources of treasure, or improved ways of wringing points from it. Socialising is a relaxing method of discovering what other players know about the business of accumulating points, that their knowledge can be applied to the task of gaining riches. Killing is only necessary to eliminate rivals or people who get in the way, or to gain vast amounts of points (if points are awarded for killing other players). ‐
Richard Bartle
One important thing to note if you haven’t and will not read Bartle’s text is that a player is seldom 100% of anything. It’s an interest graph in which each player is leaning one way or another.