Gabu!! ☁️ ΘΔ

I think one thing you’re missing as a reason for their persistence is that they’re a source of data for developers and publishers, who love making data-driven decisions. Before achievements, you couldn’t really KNOW what percentage of players reached X milestone, but now you can see exactly how many people beat the first level vs. finished the game vs. found such-and-such secret.

steam has achievement jokes, though big publishers with multiplat games obviously don't use them. i've played games with impossible ones and ones you can un-get over and over. also my perfect games list makes me look like some mega casual vn fan. i think all those things are pretty funny

also, i have proof i won 10 ranked games in a row on acr one time. that's a little satisfying to think about

it's an odd thing bc i can think of a few ps2 games with them as a fun in-game thing. in some cases they unlock things too...i thought it was really cool at the time and i actually still dig when there's like a special place in the game for stuff like that with art design and everything? i think it's the fact that it's some dumb system thing that makes it generally annoy me, that it means nothing within the game and is just some shit they had to slap on at the end

also one of the netherrealm games had a text box like

first attack
meter awarded

that looked like a trophy popup. it never stopped making me laugh

So glad to finally hear someone saying all this that's been bugging me about achievements so clearly. I never liked them much at all, but a few years ago I knew someone who would check achievements on games before buying them on steam, not to increase score, but because Steam tracked your achievement PERCENTAGE. Which meant if the game had too many hard achievements, they didn't want to buy the game and risk lowering that percentage. I have to imagine people buying stuff FOR the achievements is more common, but that moment made me realize just how no-win the situation with achievements had become, and how deeply they can affect how people engage with games.

Always gnashing my teeth at how bad the notification pop-up problem is in Steam and how Valve just did an entire UI refresh and made zero effort to address it

The "why would you want to do that" people are the worst

The thing I hate the most about achievements is that it reinforces the completionist mindset. People now expect to be able to do and see everything and game are made to satisfy that impulse. Games keep getting bigger, but they all seem small because of this.

I want to argue against this because I personally actually really like achievements and enjoy their presence in games (though by no means do I think they should be mandated and enforced on every game ever no matter how unfitting), to the point of being one of those freaks who even loves setting up my RetroAchievements when I play in an emulator, but I can't quite figure out why I like them in any way I can articulate.

Part of it is just that I'm an extremely objective oriented person, so when I'm enjoying a game enough I decide I want to see all of it having a list of everything the devs thought was important enough to have an achievement helps me figure out when everything's actually done or in games too big to really complete prioritize what to do before I move on to something else.

Or perhaps it's their link to the fear of my own mortality. That without achievements everything I do and have done in a game exists only in fleeting memories and fragile save files, and by having them I have some at least semi-permenant record of what I've done and what my time accomplished even if I'm the only person who looks back on them.

Or maybe I spent just long enough on the 360 before moving to PC gaming in '08 that Microsoft brain poisoned me and now existential dread creeps in if I waste days of my life playing video games without at least getting the serotonin pop-ups.

360 had some annoying rules you had to follow, too. Not just that you need to have X achievements adding up to Y lime gamer juice, but how many you can get in a single play-through and period of time. Basically forcing everyone to add an amount of mandatory grind.

Steam also puts your game in a state where achievements cannot be displayed on profile widgets or whatever if you didn't sell enough copies to be a real game. Same for trading cards, emojis and other Steam Bloat. I guess to stop people making achievement hunter games.

Was surprised to find the Epic Store has gamer score tied to achievements. No, don't play it on Steam! You're not earning numbers!

I've found myself recently becoming a convert to achievements because mortal kombat 1 has an achievement to 'complete a titan battle'

A thing that does not exist in the game.

It is driving the most obnoxious kind of people fucking bonkers and it's extremely funny.

Like I kind of hate achievements they're just kinda obnoxious, but this melt down almost makes it worth it.

Like you mentioned, the big thing is when they are mandatory, and their prevalence causing certain people to see a lack of them as some sort of flaw with the game itself. In-game Acheivement-like things can be fun sometimes.

It's probably been done in other games as well, but I really liked the system in Bionic Commando 09. You had a list of challenges, like "get 10 headshots with the pistol" that gave you a magazine upgrade when you completed it. So instead of buying or finding upgrades you checked your challenge list and looked for opportunities to complete them. A lot of them also worked to teach you how to play the game better, so that's cool.

I agree with your feeling, and just like another commenter I was gonna bring up WoW as a good example of how they can actually work. As far as I know WoW and Team Fortress 2 were the first games to implement them, and they were really focused on being either a prize for a really cool epic thing that happened naturally while you play (reflecting a reflected rocket, taking 3x your health without dying, etc) or suggestions of a challenge or different play style. With WoW I think what made it work was that there were so many achievements that it was obvious they're not made for completionists, and TF had just the right amount per class that it felt you would eventually get them all if you just kept playing.

I think the main takeaway for me is that achievements work well as far as you're not too aware of them. They're satisfying as a nice surprise, but when players start changing their behaviour in a way that goes against the normal loop or pace of the game to hunt an achievement, that's when things went south. Unfortunately that's not even a matter of crafting the achievement well, because the same achievement that was actually a fun feat can become a weird farming challenge because everything in games can be manipulated

I'm debating which I like less: achievements having been tacked onto games on Steam that are checkboxes with all the horrible psychological squicks aforementioned; or achievements with weighted values like Gamer Score and the tiers of trophies. I kind of like the latter less because it has the forced nature of achievements with added gross gamification? But the former is also incredibly depressing when a game that absolutely does not need achievements or wants it is forced by market pressure to throw some shitty ones in....

"As a game dev it's like if I baked pastries and I found out that people would buy some and throw them out, just because they wanted to collect boxes. It's... actually kinda weirdly upsetting?"

this goes triple for Steam Trading Cards and that whole garbage. It's so much worse!

anyway, mandating them because they provably increase engagement is the worst part, but even voluntary ones are offputting to me nowadays. In my previous game i designed them as a checklist of "here's all the A+ content in the game" with nothing being too hard, since the game had a weird structure and people might not know what all had effort put into it otherwise. If a game does have achievements i think that's the best way to do it – no super hard challenge runs, no 100% korok seeds, just "here's all the best stuff" so objective-focused players stop afterwards, while experience/challenge-focused players can keep going into the depths.

i've grown to really dislike objective-based gaming in general though, so in my current project, there's not even a checklist for the main collectible! You just have to guess if you got them all, and you need less than half for game progress. There'll probably be exactly one achievement but it'll be stupid and silly just to make the point that i'm omitting them on purpose, rather than "it hasn't been added yet".

the mind virus of the achievments extends beyond the machine!! i have a small star shaped tin for carrying jellybeans for rewarding myself throughout difficult days, and my rl clan calls them ‘cheevos’. i'm not much of a gamer gal but i do have completionist tendancies so the graffiti of gta sa, for example, tries me hard. shame, it was such a pretty game. also did the thps gaplists make anyone else impossible to play with? yet these were not gamings biggest crimes. it's the overarching systems that turn me off completely. when you have to play a game you despise the concept of because of a virtual trophy cabinet that we can't even rearrange or redecorate? that's just demanding devotion, frack that.

another strange one from microsoft was the scores for computers, xp's experience index. a reductive grading of machine capabilities so divorced from reality that it just arbitrarily grows as you cram newer stuff onto the board! before we got a four core processer (which we really didn't need but our old gateway machine was bork by design) i thought it was supposed to max out at 1.0 for ‘optimum performance’ which would have actually been a useful metric. no, it's just another arbitrary trophy for the arbitrary cabinet.

what you say about the needless specificity causing mental distress tho, i'm probably a special case. without some mind bending perspective inversion within the game, i'll invent my own, like using a tank for chases, or racing backward for every second lap. this is the kind of behaviour a studio might want to encourage, but misses the mark because (and this is the thing) i have extreme ptsd and often can't do normal things because of flashbacks, so their idea of ‘a fun twist’ is sometimes my actual hell on earth.

i can't know if this is the same underlying mismatch for everyone else, we're all more unique than a game environment can account for. though it seems to match up. people might experience ptsd or completionism or ocd or peer pressure or just number go up, but i think we're all going to break harder on some small detail because of that. so i can hard agree these prescriptivist trophies are a plague on us all.

there i stayed on topic even though it was challenging, i get a jellybean!

"As a game dev it's like if I baked pastries and I found out that people would buy some and throw them out, just because they wanted to collect boxes. It's... actually kinda weirdly upsetting"

It's weirder than that. It's like there's this whole subculture of people who buy cakes to throw them out and keep the paper/board that you set the cake on before you set it in the box. They throw everything else out, keep that, and then brag to their friends about how many weird ones they've got. Then you figure out a way to box things up without doing that and they start shouting at you, then like EVERYONE starts shouting at you because somehow even the people who aren't weird about this thinks it's super normal and expected so then THEY get upset and now people are outside your cake shop trying to organize a boycott or something..

(Edit)

Oh yeah i should talk about my feelings as "a gamer" since i'm not a dev. As might be guessable given my post, i do my best to not think about them at all. I don't like people telling me how i should play games, generally if a game says "hey you should go here" the first thing i'll do is go everywhere else because... you want me to go there? What are you hiding, developers?

I turned on Persona 5 for the first time and the game popped up a "agree to the contract y/n" prompt at THE VERY START and i was like "oh i know you, game, this is a game about rebellion and stuff, i know what contract you're talking about, let's see what happens when i pick 'n'." And then it booted me back to the title screen.

Achievements are like that for me. When i do things with them it's generally going out of my way to NOT get them because i'm not into pavlovian training or whatever.

When i played Portal i did my best to use physics tricks and infinite momentum to just launch my way to the finish rather than actually solving the puzzles.

When i was like 14 a therapist wrote on a piece of paper that i was "difficult to motivate with traditional reward/punishment stimulus".

There are a couple games i've actually gotten all the achievements in, Bloodborne for example. It's only because i played that game so much i eventually just did everything required for all of them.

So the only thing i get out of achievements existing is the perverse sense of satisfaction of defeating yet another thing in this world that other people want me to do.