Achiever: Lets all stroke our egos!
Third and Five Games
This week we’ll be examining the Achiever. We all know this
gamer as well, the one with an astronomically high gamerscore or trophy points
or every achievement in any game you could think of. A lot of these gamers
display traits found in the Collector, the Competitor, and the Explorer. This
is the gamer that played Avatar or CSI or Cars: Maternational or King Kong or
TMNT. It should be noted that all of these are rather unexciting Xbox 360 titles;
because that’s the system I frequent the most. Each of these titles have less
than 10 achievements that add up to an easy 1000 point gamerscore (or whatever
the equivalent is on PS3) for very little work, sometimes not even finishing
the game. I know this because I took this route when I first got a 360. I was
so excited that my achievements could be tracked that I forgot about the games
themselves. As a result, I played some awful games just going for that easy
1000 points. Once I heard friends bragging about how they ‘beat’ the game
without actually playing it, I was done with that nonsense.
From time to time I’ll try for an achievement in the course
of playing the game, but won’t play the game striving to hit some arbitrary
goals created that may not coincide with completing the actual game. These
gamers like getting everything possible out of a game, even more than the
explorer or collector. They not only seek to explore everywhere and collect
every next to impossible item, but seek to finish the game with a completion
percentage of 100%. A lot of the Lego games are made specifically for these
gamers, offering the gamer a change to simply finish the story or to play each
level over and over and over hoping to collect each goodie and unlock every
arbitrary character. In playing Lego Star Wars, I had no urge to unlock the
winged troll that ran the show Anakin worked in or Jarjar Binks’ keeper, but
they certainly gave me the option to.
More and more games are adopting this approach, like the
prettiest kid in the orphanage. Unfortunately, this kid can sometimes set fires
or kick furry little creatures both in real life as well as the video game
parallel I’m drawing. While some way to keep track of how completely you’re
sinking your teeth into a game is a good idea, letting you know down to
fractions of percentage points tastes like someone sprinkled sand on my steak,
hoping I’ll taste the difference in each grain. Doing this can detract from
gameplay in a big way, instead of appreciating the game and enjoying the
experience; you’re stuck wondering if you destroyed all the joker teeth or
collected every tank (or whatever) part. When I play a game, I prefer to feel
as involved as possible. This feeling is called presence and there are so many
ways to shatter that feeling while playing a game, one huge way is making you replay
levels to collect goodies, or giving you levels you have to return to after
you’ve collected or unlocked more skills (the most common being some sort of
double jump). Thanks Castlevania and Outland, we appreciate it.
Do these gamers brag about how big their e-genitalia happen
to be? Probably not, they let their massive e-rections (or e-boobs…although
that doesn’t work as well) speak for themselves to most people. Hey let people
gaze in awe as they finish horrible game after horrible game just for the trophies
that will never actually mean anything to anyone but other achievers. Sometimes
a group of achievers will find each other and compete with one another to reach
an arbitrary milestone first. The one my friends are competing towards
currently is 80k, meanwhile, I’m sitting comfortably around 34k.
Not make people choose to remain achievers for their entire
gaming career, it’s hard work to put that much into a game once you realize
that those feats mean a little more than nothing to most people. Sorry to
disappoint, but no one actually cares that you killed 100,000 enemies in Gears
2, even if you did get a huge 50 point achievement for it. Most non-gamers, and
even some games, might tell the individual to get a job and stop wasting their
life. In addition, sometimes these gamers remember that they are playing games
for the experience of the game, not to stroke their own…lets say ego.
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