thoughthead

Monday night around 9:45PM (EST) StripClubDj became the first person on Xbox Live to break the 100,000 Gamerscore barrier. How do I know this? How do I even know who StripClubDj is? Well I was on mygamercard.net that night and saw he was nearing that milestone and that he had posted in a thread talking about shooting for that goal. So I stuck around and watched his Gamerscore roll over. Gamerscores are a funny thing, they can fundamentally change the way you approach gaming, they can change how you think about a gaming community and they can open the doors to exciting new experiences you might not have otherwise tried as well as make you do things you’d really rather not do.

Before the Xbox 360 launched Microsoft was boasting their new Xbox Live experience centered around a Gamertag, with things like your GamerZone, Reputation and Gamerscore. It seemed like an interesting idea but I was generally uninterested because while I’m competitive I’m not one for Leaderboards and the like. I have a short attention span when it comes to games, I’ll play a game and nothing else until it’s “dead” and there’s nothing left to do, then I’ll move on to something else and never look back. This is how I’ve always played games. There are a handful of titles I cherish and come back to from time to time, and other games that are good for when I’m entertaining game friendly company, but in general that’s my M.O.

It wasn’t until I actually brought an Xbox 360 home that I realized the Achievement system and Gamerscore were actually perfectly suited to my tastes. Soon after I realized that I wasn’t the only one who gamed that way either. A game’s Achievements read like a to-do list and every new game is like a challenge to reach the ultimate goal of giving your OCD self the warm and fuzzies. Like TiVo, HDTV, and sex; it’s one of those things where if you don’t have it you don’t need it but once you do have it you can’t do without it.

For those of you unfamiliar with Achievements and Gamerscore let me break it down for you. Full retail games (those priced new at $40 and up) will offer anywhere between five and 50 tasks that the gamer could try to complete. These tasks are called Achievements, they each have a unique title, an icon, and a short description of what needs to be done to earn it, some will be Secret Achievements in which case you don’t know the requirements or what the icon looks like until you’ve already unlocked it. Each achievement has a point point value, which can range anywhere from zero to 500 points but the sum of all the Achievements for a particular game can’t be more then 1000. Xbox Live Arcade games (and those games priced new at $20 and below) offer a maximum of 200 points across a maximum of 12 Achievements. All of these Achievement points dump into a number called your Gamerscore, which is essentially the sum of all your Achievements from every 360 game you’ve ever played. Once you’ve unlocked an achievement you’ve essentially earned it for the rest of your life, it can’t be undone and your Gamerscore can only ever move in one direction, up.
A lot of gamers argue that a Gamerscore isn’t an accurate representation of how good a gamer you are, or that the Gamerscore is useless because it’s easier to earn points in some games but not others. I think the important thing to note here is the distinction between Gamerscore and Achievements. Certainly they’re related but they can also be looked at independently. For instance in Project Gotham Racing 3 I can see if someone has earned the “Platinum Champion” Achievement meaning they’ve beat every race in the game on the “Hardcore” difficulty. While this Achievement is worth almost nothing for points when compared to the work involved seeing that someone has this achievement you know they’re a good player at that specific game, and you can compare yourself to others on a game by game basis. It’s sort of a virtual merit badge. Similar to sports, looking at a total number of points scored in your lifetime might not be an accurate indication of anything but longevity of play, but taking a closer look at the individual games played you have a better idea of how good a player that person really is. I’ve had many friendly competitions with friends to see who could complete a game the fastest or who could could stay ahead in points etc. Sure I might not ever catch up to StripClubDj but I can definitely keep up with my friends who are within my range. Why do we play any games anyway, video or otherwise but to partake in friendly competition and accrue points.

While some people have managed to get away with owning a 360 and genuinely not caring about their Gamerscore or Achievements (you know, those jerks who “don’t like to keep score”), the Achievement system often fundamentally changes the way many Xbox 360 owners approach gaming. When you’re presented with a list of things to-do the natural tendency is often to try to complete the list. This causes an interesting result as gamers are trying things in games they wouldn’t normally try to do. Some, including myself, are even going as far as playing games they wouldn’t normally play, and some are even going as far as to actively avoid playing some games. For instance in Project Gotham Racing there is an achievement for taking pictures in each of the different featured cities, and another one for designing 10 custom tracks. If not for the Achievement I would have never thought to try these modes, and I’m glad I did try them because the track builder feature became one of my favorite parts of the game. Another good example is Call of Duty 2, I think most people would normally have purchased the game, played through a bit of it on the normal difficulty level, some would have finished, others wouldn’t have and only the hardcore gamers would bother trying to play the game on the Veteran difficulty level. The way the Achievements were laid out you got most of your points by playing through on the Veteran difficulty, as a result a truly massive amount of people spent way more time and got way more out of the game then they normally would have.

This makes for another interesting point: how do I even know so many people completed the game on veteran. Well an interesting addition to the whole Gamerscore/Achievement situation is that Microsoft has made the information not only availble on the console but availble publicly online (see my stats in the upper right of this very page) to anyone wants to share it. This has spawned a massive community of Gamerscore Whores who eat, sleep, breath, and generally live for Achievements There are numerous sites that keep tabs on where your rank world wide, how you’ve progressed, how you match up with your friends, how you match up with random other players, even what your console might say about you if it had a voice.

I think more importantly then earning trophies for your wall and accruing points Achievements and Gamerscore has really changed the Xbox Live experience from just a multiplayer service into a truly connected community. I’ve met and made friends with people I might not otherwise have met. You’ll be waiting in an online lobby and someone will check your stats, then you’ll hear them pipe up over the voice chat “Hey! I see you got the Beat the Noob! Achievement, how’d you do that?” Of course that opens a dialog and you start looking at each other stats and trading strategies and you’ll probably decided to meet up online the following night so you can work together and help each other out with other Achievements. It’s not just limited to Xbox Live either, people can see these stats on a computer, I’ll get email or forum PMs from people asking for advice. And this isn’t some clicky social club, everyone is on equal grounds and it’s not some MySpace social network spin-off where the common ground is teenage angst and poor grammar; it’s a community of people connected through a hobby where they have fun, there aren’t many examples of those around that you can point to.

Another interesting twist is that you don’t even have to be a paying member to be a part of this community, you don’t even need to own an Xbox 360 console. Microsoft offers all of these things through their free Silver level Xbox Live service. I have several friends who don’t own an Xbox 360 of their own, yet they have Silver accounts that they use when they visit me or any of their other friends who do have the console. Since it’s all connected online they can just sit down and login. I think this is vital to the community building because it doesn’t exclude anyone. Most of all even gamers who don’t typically play multiplayer online can compete with their friends through the single player experiences which is a dramatically different concept.

There are some negative effects though, mostly due to specific implementations rather then the system itself. With people going out of their way to knock Achievements off the checklist, poorly thought out achievements can actually hurt others trying to play the game normally. A good example is achievements earned playing online. I think it’s a good idea to offer Achievements for things in online modes to encourage people to go online and try that aspect of the games but I have a big problem with games that specifically tie their online Achievements to Ranked mode. Typically Ranked mode is where they keep track of the Leaderboards, and there are provisions in place to keep you from playing with your friends to help prevent cheating. The problem is you now have people who want to get the Achievements and they’re playing Ranked games online with different goals then the people who are playing with a more professional attitude to improve their ranking. I understand that tying it to ranked mode helps reduce cheating to get Achievements but it also inadvertently hurts ranked mode for those who play it for the original purpose of getting ranked. There aren’t any real regulations for how Achievements should be used and I don’t know if there really should be but I think developers should really think about how the community approaches it and how that effects the other aspects of their games.

It’s interesting how a software feature of a game console can so dramatically change how people approach gaming, how it can change what games they decide to play and what games they decide to avoid, and how it really turned Xbox Live from just a multiplayer service into a gaming community. It is addicting and I know I’ve personally passed up the same game on other consoles just so I can get Achievements when I play the Xbox 360 version. Microsoft has got me hooked, but that’s OK I’m having fun doing it and it’s opened my eyes to a whole lot of gaming experiences I otherwise wouldn’t have tried and new people I otherwise wouldn’t have met. To me that makes it a good thing, and in some ways I’m almost disappointed that the other consoles aren’t implementing similar devices. I think maybe they don’t get it, I think they need to experience it first hand because like some other things in life you don’t need it until you have it, and once you have it you don’t want to do with out it.