Last week I ended up in a discussion about the use and abuse of achievements as a progression support instead of offering challenges that either changed the players approach to the gameplay or that allow for extra –more difficult- goals. My fellow Vlambeer Jan Willem Nijman tweeted to point out that Assasssins Creed II hands out three different achievements or throphies before the game actually starts – you’ll have moved the left and right analog stick, pressed a few buttons as instructed by a giant, flashing prompt and you’ll have climbed a building to get that far in the game.
It’s a discussion that has been raging on and off – ridiculing the achievements and trophies that games hand out so easily for the most trivial of tasks and normal progression. It's also a minor subject within a broader discussion on whether games have dumbed down too much to cater to non-gamers. Slowly paced tutorials walk players through everything with command prompts and sequences and cutscenes queue up to teach players how to move their analog sticks and how to jump. At the end of every step – how trivial it might be - an achievement is unlocked.
It’s a sentiment commonly heard amongst ‘core gamers’ and it’s a sentiment that I agree with on many levels – a lot of contemporary videogames simply do not dare to offer challenging gameplay anymore in fear of alienating a rather significant portion of their audience. The relentless difficulty Demon Souls or Super Crate Box offer is a concrete risk when you’re gambling with tens of millions of dollars. Thus, the lowest common denominator reigns, actual challenge locked away behind difficulties that are hopefully available from the start of the game.
A few months ago my girlfriend decided to check out what this medium I rave about all the time entails. Together, we decided she should start with Assassins Creed II because I felt it had a well-paced and expansive tutorial. She’s someone that has played every Angry Birds game, The Sims and Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego. I had suggested Sword & Sworcery before hoping its relaxed nature would ease her in, but instead its reliance on gaming tropes and perceived monotony shunned her away.
As every gamer knows, it’s tough to sit back and watch someone walk into walls endlessly. She did exactly this in her first ten minutes of Assassins Creed II, frustration levels rising slowly to the point where she would just give up and never try again. After minutes that seemed like hours of desperately trying to steer a character straight ahead, she finally succeeded.
I used to argue that just achieving that goal in itself should be an adequate reward to motivate new gamers to continue playing, but I did not take into account that new gamers are fully aware walking should be a trivial tasks; they know that it isn’t a tough challenge to walk straight in a game, even if it is fully reasonable for them to find it difficult having never used gamepads before. They realize it is not an accomplishment by any standard and thus the argument fails. She was already tired of playing and about to quit when the console played that unmistakable notification sound: achievement unlocked.
She noticed the pat on the back and gave the game five more minutes of her attention - whereas if the game had just continued without the achievement, she would've been likely to just give up. The three achievements my colleague was quipping about were exactly the ones that kept my girlfriend's attention and motivation up for the twenty minutes she played that day.
The reality is that ‘non-gamer’ as a concept has changed from what it was. Where previously, ‘non-gamers’ were people without any gaming experience, the recent rise of casual games has ensured ‘non-gamers’ practically don’t exist anymore. Where it used to be that non-gamers were a blank slate that would learn to deal with the oddities of the high barrier of entry in videogames through practice, nowadays they are anything but a blank slate. They have years of gaming experience – only the games they play are Angry Birds and Farmville.
One of the things that sets casual games apart is their short feedback/reward cycles, rewarding players for pretty much every action through exaggerated feedback. These are games that are accessible beyond anything the mainstream industry can ever hope to achieve through their simple pickup-and-play designs. While playing, the games will carefully detail every step of progress through little popups. When done, players are bombarded with over-the-top scoring systems with clear ceilings and values. The goal, of course, is that players might feel good about themselves.
Achievements and trophies can take the place of such feedback in mainstream games. While the ease of achieving such goals seem trivial to more proficient gamers, for many new to the medium they are actual achievements that they’ve been conditioned to expect reward for in a measurable way. These games are not simple to control and they are far from pickup and play – Assassins Creed II takes several hours of slow introduction and half a dozen achievements before feeling confident enough to let players into its wonderful world.
The longer I mulled over the problem, the more I realized that an achievement is actually an extremely elegant solution to easing new players in. They’re unobtrusive, they’re measurable, they do not affect or corrupt the design of the game and they can be handed out in abundance at the start of a game. They do not require attention or interaction – they can simply be an indication of progression that is concrete instead of abstract. They're exactly what a casual gamer needs without negatively influencing the core experience more seasoned gamers are interested in.
I started reading websites dedicated to achievements to see what the objections were to simple achievements. This being the internet, I found an unquantifiable amount of complaints about achievements being ‘too easy’. As I started digging deeper, a realization set in: the problem these people were having wasn’t so much with the achievement being too easy to unlock for them – the problem was that others could unlock it just as easily. It’s the idea that if a ‘non-gamer’ can do it, things can't be an achievement. At best, it's a cry for more challenging games - at its worst, it's an attempt to safeguard the exclusivity of hardcore gaming from newcomers. The underlying thought is simple: achievements are supposed to be for 'real' gamers.
It is often wrongfully assumed that accessibility means sacrificing challenge or complexity, but it is neither – it is a way to allow people that otherwise couldn’t to experience the challenge and complexity that a game can offer. Such considerations are even – or more so – relevant to indie game developers. Whereas mainstream game developers have to deal with the consideration of non-gamers playing their game, indie game developers do not have the luxury of necessity – they might simply not consider the possibility of non-gamers playing their games.
My girlfriend and I are now playing through Halo 2. Last week, she suddenly backed off when overwhelmed by two Elites and strafed sideways into cover, proving she has succesfully mapped the actions on the analog stick to movement in the virtual world. She has rapidly evolved a sense of battle flow in Halo and will shout at me to help her or jump into the fray when she hears my shield depleted sound. If she had quit Assassins Creed II for not rewarding her with a concrete, measurable reward - she might've given up on gaming beyond Angry Birds altogether and miss a wide spectrum of amazing things.
So if I may recommend something that'll take thirty minutes of your time, just to get some new perspective as a game designer: sit down and watch your parents, partner or friends struggle through all the trivial tasks in any game that you consider absolutely great. If anything it’s amusing, at best it’s a great way to challenge your assumptions of accessibility. With that new perspective, take a look at what your games do to usher in new players. No-one says you have to implement your findings if you don't want to, no-one says you have to dial back on the challenge in a game or sacrifice complexity. Maybe your game isn't meant to be more accessible, maybe you'll find that it is a good idea to reconsider. There might just be an argument for your game to hand out a concrete and measurable pat on the back if someone does something that might – to you and me – seem trivial.
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If we would explicitly write "easy", "normal", "hard", "very hard", "hardcore", "legendary", etc. on the achievements, the whole "achievements aren't for noobs" argument would just become completely irrelevant.
Core gamers' achievements would be acknowledged by the games themselves as being much more valuable than those of "casual" gamers in the first place, without necessarily alienating beginners - if it's done properly.
"If she had quit Assassins Creed II for not rewarding her with a concrete, measurable reward - she might've given up on gaming beyond Angry Birds altogether and miss a wide spectrum of amazing things. "
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What does she actually enjoy about Assassins Creed or playing Halo?
She decided to give it a try either way, just to see what it was about and Sword & Sworcery didn't work out at all. Assassins Creed II was going to be a second try - a second try that nearly didn't work, but that little achievement pushed her through long enough to actually get a bit of a feel.
Now, she's quite liking the combat in the Halo CE Anniversary Edition, which she finished recently & like the article says, we're now playing Halo 2 together. She laughs at certain weird things that happen in the combat sandbox, she hates enemies with sticky grenades and she thinks my Warthog handling is terrible. These are all things she would not have experienced otherwise and her increasing understanding of game systems & controls will allow her to experience many more.
The only thing the achievements did was offer her a place that felt familiar while she was getting to grips with things. Mind you, I wrote this article in a response to her reactions, thoughts and remarks - so many of these events are rather recent. I can't say what it'll do in the long run, but I thought the effect the achievements had was interesting/surprising enough to write about.
women function on direct communicative reception/behavior. Men are looking for something with adventure/hill to conquer ...
I know many women that are more competitive than many of my male friends and many men that simply don't really care for adventure or conquest. I also think that even if what you say were true - that that should not stop us from trying to find ways to make great games accessible to more people.
My other complaint is more specific to Microsoft. These achievements contribute to gamerscores and people compare these as some kind of proof of something. That would be fine if achievements were even somewhat demanding to get, but as it is its laughable. How do you get a thousand points for your gamer score? Master a game, or rent ten games and play through their first level? As said, Sony has avoided this problem fairly well just by ranking their trophies.
My real feeling is that these kinds of systems should be implemented on a game by game basis, that way designers can do whatever is necessary for their game. Assassin's Creed would still require some way to pull the beginner along - but would it have to be "achievements"? It could be any number of things. Some games may not require such a system at all. Others might have incredibly detailed ones. There's a huge list of "achievements" in Xenoblade - even though the Wii itself doesn't support such a system. That is the right way to go in my opinion - game specific leaderboards and so forth. I would be happy to see system wide programs abandoned.
Of course, I doubt they're going anywhere.
I guess that where first, I agreed with you, now I like to think easy achievements the same way I think of real life standing and walking: sure, pretty much everyone can do those, but they're still achievements.
But in general, I hope I didn't come across as too negative. You're making some very interesting points about achievements as a way encourage beginners to keep going. That's a good insight. I'd always thought of them as basically competitive in nature before.
It's an interesting hypothesis, either way.
everyone likes rewards, but it's tricky business.
Did Star Wars or the Princess Bride create accessible "here comes the choo choo" material?
To a certain degree yes, but they also addressed an adult audience first and foremost. there were relevant meaningful chunks in both ~ the Force was religion and what we don't know and how we relate socially about it. the grandfather / son relationship in the Princess Bride as well. both have sense of meaning, a strong one too.
"what if" you could have put achievements in Baldur's Gate or Final Fantasy 7 also? Would it have given them the cult status they have now or broken them down into meaningless commercialized junk?
Would Baldur's Gate have been better if there were 100 levels and a ding after each one?
Would FF7 be better if after every dramatic story cue there was "you completed story section such and such ***ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED*** ?
Lets put this in real world rubber meets road, if you walked into a Star Bucks and the clerk said congrats you leveled to your next cup of joe, what do you thikn your response might be?
I guess you're replying to the broader discussion of 'should we put achievements after every chapter' here, but that's not what I'm arguing for. I'm not saying achievements should be used indiscriminately, I'm saying achievements could be used as an accessibility tool for new gamers.
Sure, the device also plays a role - but many are closer to games simply due to the casual gaming 'revolution' of recent years.
The reason your comparison with movies fails is because there is a fundamental difference between movies, Starbucks and games are that games simply do not work without interaction. You can't sit back and let it come over you and gain a tiny bit of understanding from a game, like you can just watch Star Wars.
I can't really follow up on your "what ifs" because the situation back then was different - there were no casual games, new gamers had a blank slate in terms of expectations and achievements and trophies did not exist like they do today. Nowadays, they do - and as I stated in my post - I'm glad they do. Without them, I don't think my girlfriend would've gotten into gaming.
Accessibility kills the nature of the medium, and it stupifies because it spends none of it's time making you work (not just mindless repetition). It's no longer about teaching a man (or child) to fish it's about putting him in a wheel chair through inadvertant but frankly demasculinitizing behaviorial kudos.
Far more disturbing about your reply is the assumption that games should be masculine and that certain genres are or should be reserved for a certain sex.
I will not be part of your 'reality' and if I can, I will see it changed.
Unrelated, this discussion is over. I want this to be about the article, not yet another useless discussion about 'who gaming is for'.
The article is talking about positive reinforcement, not teaching the player what to do. An achievement doesn't really communicate how to play, it just gives you a pat on the back for demonstrating that you understand a concept.
I'm only arguing that there are many ways to give this same positive reinforcement in the game. Why go outside of the game to give this feedback? If you directly tell the player they did a good job, why not have a character or event in the game communicate this information?
We both however enjoy "some" shows that are the same .. Bones and IT Crowd~ But there is no specifically commuicative material to either of us. What applies to these is the actually meaningful and universally humorous appeal of each respectively. Neither of these "breaks things down" What they do is ~ relate.
I'm not saying we should 'graft broadstream market decisions' onto everything. I'm saying achievements could be a great way to help people that want to get into games achieve that goal.
I also sincerely disagree is that [insert gaming minority] 'don't want to game' (in the case of women, I believe recent number state they are actually the largest gaming audience in the world through casual and social games). For 'core games', however, I can imagine that many are simply turned off by the games in their current state, but with the attitude that 'games simply aren't for [insert the same gaming minority here]' we're not going to fix that. I think we should fix that, not by dumbing games down, but by working on their accessibility.
My wife loves games (video games in particular) and it has not achievements that gave passage to try them ~ it has to do with social parameters and what she believed she could be good at. She enjoys games because I dethorned them, she used to only play "safe" puzzle games. Now she is a fierce hard core gamer. But she is a gamer because the social "space" was safe and ok to try. Achievements are what she now enjoys most, but that is because she is guided by a different set of passions. Completely different.
Achievements are not an answer to creating a safe place to try something new, achievements only "suggest" that they do. they are not a larger means to an ends they are a stop gap bridge that more often than not breaks the 4th wall, panders to children and stupifies the material into a meaningless everyone "loves Disney learning" for the mentally handicapped.
Again, achievements do not dumb down games - they are popups that do not influence the game itself.
I think the real issue isn't achievements but that different minds need different stimulants, for instance I find most achievements laughable because they are badly designed and most of them are just a nuisance (achievements = modern fetch quest).
I think the principle you're missing here isn't achievements it's a way for a game to positive re-inforce behaviors for people to whom gaming is a foreign language (i.e. get them through the learning curve).
The fact that your girlfriend could pick up Angry birds easily and not assassins creed, there is something there IMHO that needs to be articulated and clarified. Why was she able to pick up angry birds but not AC?
Try to figure out what motivated her/what she liked about angry birds (what causes her enjoyment, or to keep playing it).
I think many games just are causing different re-enforcement. For 'core gamers' gameplay is INTRINSICALLY re-enforcing, but people who are not gamers find gameplay tedious and need goals beyond the activity in and of itself.
I think that is what achievements is all about - goals that are easily reachable within short periods of time. They need rewards much faster and more frequently at the beginning (being new to games) to keep them going so you make all the goals trivial so that there is an 'on ramp' to deeper gaming.
I have my doubts though whether such a thing scales since in my estimation most modern gamers playing games don't actually COME for the game anymore. They come for aesthetics / audio visual bang / story. The real problem is that we have lots of people "playing games" who don't actually ENJOY GAMES for their own sake, they need story/hollywood/some other thing on top of it and I think that is seriously ruining games for those of us who are 'core gamers'.
Since games are trying to be a jack of all trades but master of none, so you get watered down crap. Games have become something closer to an excuse to cause a financial transaction then actually developing a product for a market. When you have to break your game to get the funds or cater to people who don't get games with superfluous elements something is extremely wrong.
She was able to pick up Angry Birds because the controls are simple and based on me talking with her about it, one of the things that kept her coming back was that the positive reinforcement from the game was concrete and measurable. In 'my' games, she never saw the point because "how do I know what I'm doing, why and what do you get for your effort?". The achievements were a safe environment for her to transition, which she did. Yes, she might be an edge case, although obviously that doesn't invalidate the findings.
But yes, achievements are one specific way to apply the same methodic of offering new gamers a concrete, measurable reward that is not within the context of the game. I suppose I encountered it through achievements and achievements articulate the idea well, so that's what I wrote about.
Because you will see it changed?
As a developer and someone who wants games to attract more audiences, this article is quite interesting. As long it can be completely turned off or, for different kinds of players, filtered by difficulty/importance, and that it doesn't damage the game's polishing by sucking up development time, it's all good.
The question begs in my mind when most of your audience are males in their teens and twenties would this be a good thing. At the exact time in their life when they need the best learning they are back to training wheels, no mountain no glory no meaning either.
The other parallel stuff is once the player tries something and it works, they might be mind-blocked from trying different approaches unless forced or challenged to. Which in this case can be done by design in many different ways.
There are also the cases in which the games difficulty choices change how the the game should be played in a "perfect" solution to separate the experiences for different players, but some psychological barrier put core players to evaluate the games on normal difficulty as if anything above is how the game was intended to be. When in the end they might be playing the version that's not targeted at them.
So there's a lot of tricky stuff to deal with when trying to make stuff in the range for different players, as there are problems with the players themselves that blocks them from understanding what the game in trying to do or leading themselves a path of not seeing the best part of it, but that wouldn't work as well if forced down the player's throat anyway.
The things you note are exactly things that in the end lead to achievements being a good solution: you don't need an easier path, you don't need stop players from exploring multiple paths, you don't need difficulty settings to have them and you don't need to dumb down the game. All you need is a little popup.
If it's difficult for a beginner to walk a straight line with a gamepad, then something is either wrong with the game, or the gamepad. And as to achievement, there should be none, as going straight should be just a matter of pushing the stick forward (or button for forward down if on a PC).
Some might say that it could be the calibration, but I'll assume that Mr. Ismail has a proper calibrated/proper deadzone corrected gamepad.
On PC (especially ports of console games) it is not uncommon for mouse smoothing/acceleration combined with user input tied to the frame rate to cause horrible input latency.
PS! Crappy gamepads has really bad "corners" so almost forward might cause you to careen to the left or right.
Why do you expect an impersonal message to deliver personal message?
Yes we can put whirlers and party hats on puppies and bunnies (if only "achievements" were actually this good) and isn't it great! Or maybe we can just celebrate art for what it means, I don't know. Instead of trying to commercialize something into only having a meaningless lining of synthetic cash out emotional gibberish.
It's not just offensive on it's a commericalized crap sense, it's literally crutches for free thgouht where none are needed. Real art doesn't actually need to be explained in baby talk "so everyone feels safe and comfy".
Furthermore, it kills the soul of men to be coddled and have rails and caution signs on every damn thing we do. Today it's in the name of a perfectly equally shared slice of imaginary pie guidelines tommorrow we have lost any freedom that means we can actually be MEN.
Please stop with the ridiculous metaphors, the strange idea that a AAA mass-market game should be considered purely as art rather than design and the extremely misguided notion that games are meant to make you feel like a man.
So unobtrusive in your mind means what? Because achievements in my mind trigger a response, and not one I have ever enjoyed. That's my vote ~ they suck. The reason I know this? Because they intrude on the cognitive flow of a game, any game. They insert a synthetic definition into a creative space without need or want. They suggest alternative meaning wihtout a defining bearing other than kudos. I don't need artificial kudos it's insulting, condescending and a lie directly to the player, because the authorship at best is a shallow fraud. A unthinking, insincere promise. Like saying "I love you." With a pat on the back to relatives you hope not to see for at least another year on the next holiday.
A lot of poeple are quite receptive to co-dependent relatioships too, most "people" in my experience aren't grown up and living in conscious truthfulness. And many "people" agree to abusive relationships~
Take a look around at how many people function under terrible circumstances. Demonstrating they need greater love and need for elevated learning. Not wheel chair "quick fixes".
and what does this even mean Rami?
"except the reasonable notion that most games want to be played by as many people as possible."
Do games have a consciousness and right also? Did you buy into the absurd notion that games are entities? Or even just corporations are? Am I misunderstanding you?