Memoirs of an Achievement Whore

The mission is to stay alive. Who the hell cares what the objectives are in this campaign as long as I stay alive the entire time. I’m by myself right now and there are tanks roaming around trying to make me their bitch. What do I do? Is that a helicopter? Holy crap, hiding behind this building has become useless as the chopper rains bullets into my face. I crawl inside the building where three guys open fire on me.  I die. The “f” word makes it way out of my mouth in rapid succession causing my wife to shake her head, obviously vexed by my tirade. Maybe if she was a deranged, achievement obsessed junkie, like me, she would understand how important this fifteen point achievement is. If I want those fifteen points deposited into my gamer score I have to complete a mission without dying once. So I back out of the game and restart the mission from scratch. Twenty minutes later I find myself in the same exact situation. Two tanks roam around a small village in search for me while ground troops search the buildings. I don’t have heavy duty weapons that are powerful enough to quickly dispatch two heavily armored tanks that are surrounded by cannon fodder. Then, as I realized I forgot, a helicopter comes into view.  I have a precious few moments to dive inside a building before its chain gun peppers my characters body with lead. Inside the building, the same building as last time, I get attacked by three dudes. I was better prepared for them this time though and managed to swiftly take all of them down with controlled bursts from my weapon. From there I creep out the other side of the building where a tank welcomes me with a giant shell to my face. I instantly die. More “f” bombs, more eye rolling from the wife. I rinse and repeat this method many more times and each time I get a little farther just before meeting my demise. I quit playing the game, put it back into the Gamefly case, and send it on its way.

You might be reading this thinking that I hated the game, Battlefield Bad Company. But the truth is, I actually loved it.  The quirky dialogue and action packed gun fights were really fun. I blamed the achievements for why I never finished the game and why thinking about playing it again makes me cringe. But as the years have passed, I realized that it was my stupid obsession with achievements that ruined this game for me. It was because of this game and the way I reacted to it that I ended my subscription to Gamefly, which in turn ended my endless quest for the largest gamer score on the planet. I’m not too sure why I wanted that. Perhaps I was over compensating for a small penis by making my proverbial cock much larger than everyone’s, but my penis is very large so that wasn’t it. No matter what my reasons were, I am glad I’ve had the opportunity to experience a breaking point in my quest for achievements. This whole experience made me realize that I have allowed achievements to ruin gaming for me.  It made me think of Halo 3 and how I wanted to get every achievement out of the way so I could FINALLY enjoy the game.  I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was a horrible way to perceive the games I was playing. Achievements were controlling the way I played and the way I felt about games.  Fortunately, I’ve changed my view on the situation and came to the conclusion that I could still be an achievement hunter as well as a video game enthusiast. I play video games so I can experience fantastic stories and fun game play sequences. Achievements arrived on the scene much, much later and overall I think they’ve helped fuel the gaming economy. On that same note, I feel that they have harmed the gaming community despite its harmless intentions.

First you have to ask yourself why achievements are important or helpful to video games (other consoles have their own versions, such as PlayStation’s trophies). The answer is opinion based. In my opinion, achievements have given completionists something more to work towards.  Have you ever found yourself playing a game like Grand Theft Auto and even though you’ve completed the campaign, you were only 60% finished with the game? Some people may have played their asses off to finish that last 40 percent and others just moved on. With the addition of achievements, developers can offer a reward for completing 100% of their game, like Rockstar did with Grand Theft Auto IV. I was one of those people who wouldn’t have completed the entire game, but with incentive to add points to my overall gamer score, hell yes I’m in! I’ve explored parts of that game that I never would have if it weren’t for that one achievement. I met all of the random characters in the game which were just ghosts to me on my first play through. I drove vehicles off of ramps that I never knew existed and I climbed rooftops that I didn’t know where climbable. I explored everything that Rockstar poured their hearts and souls into and it gave me a much larger appreciation for their hard work and dedication. I’ve found that a lot of games use achievements to get gamers to explore their fantasy worlds deeper than just the campaign and to me that is a very useful tool.

I also think achievements are important because they provide a status bar, or a completion bar for people to keep track of their history.  Some people don’t consider the game to be finished until they’ve completed all of the achievements (I’m guilty of this). It’s a tool they can use to compare to their friends for bragging rights.  For me, I like to boast about my accomplishments with video game achievements. I’m currently nearing one hundred thousand as an overall score and to date, I’ve gotten every single Assassin’s Creed achievement and over 90% of all Halo achievements. Not many people can say that, so booyah. But being able to look back on your accomplishments provides a better feeling than just saying, “Yeah, I’ve played that game.” Now, you can show people, or they can look for themselves.

As achievements in video games have grown over the years, so have the negatives impacts they have on gaming. Take downloadable content for example. Back in the day (can a 27 year old man say that phrase yet?) I remember DLC being a little bit of love served from the developer to the gamer to keep the fun rolling. They were like smaller versions of expansion packs that PC gamers would see with their games. Halo 2 is a huge game that was continually supported by Bungie and they didn’t have the plague of achievements to assist in their sales. If the game did very well and a lot of people were playing it, then it was easier for a company to add on more content. I only saw this practice in great games (although I’m sure other companies dipped their feet into the water a little bit), but once achievements were added into the mix, the rise of DLC amongst any game has risen! Especially since Microsoft forces companies to charge for DLC if they want to add achievements into it. Hence you see free DLC such as the survival add on from the original Left 4 Dead come out with zero achievements, but you see crappy DLC released from Bulletstorm selling for ten dollars only because they have achievements. Die hard achievement hunters like myself have been purchasing this stuff for the wrong reasons. In order to keep a game 100%, you have to purchase new achievements, no matter how crappy the content may be, and that is exactly what it has become. A lot of gamers will purchase DLC if it has achievements and only for that reason. Fortunately, companies that are making good games are also making good content later. Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto come to mind when I think about downloadable content that was worth my money and that I purchased (not Skyrim, yet) so I could play it for fun, not for achievements.

So what is this whole rant about? Well it's a story to share with you how I overcame bad gaming habits. I no longer play games just for achievements. I don’t use Gamefly anymore because it was aiding my addiction. Now, I play games because I want to get a great story and great game play while revealing that story. I still hunt down those achievements that I want, but I have boundaries now. I will play new games all the way through without worrying about the achievements. This strategy has worked out very well for me because I am able to appreciate the game for what it is and what it is meant to be. Achievements have become an afterthought rather than a forethought.  I no longer purchase full priced DLC unless I really want to play it for story purposes or because I really like the multiplayer (Gears of War and Halo). I wait for all other DLC to go on sale because I am most likely only buying them for achievements (Bulletstorm and Assassin’s Creed). Finally, I’ve learned that hunting for achievements is a good hobby to have, as long as I don’t forget about why I play games in the first place. Appreciate the art first, then go screw around. I am really hoping that one day I can find the courage to play Bad Company again, heck I’d enjoy not cringing every time I think about playing it.  Stay tuned for my next chat on achievements because I’ll be talking about good achievements that are fun to hunt, and bad achievements that spawn suicidal thoughts while hunting them.