This just hit me like right now at 3am in the morning; what has happened to our gaming? More precisely the reward system… Confused? Don’t worry I’ll explain what I’m talking about.
I assume you know about achievements and similar systems by now? Little “badges” recording pre-determined accomplishments, can be anything from completing a tutorial with funny names like “Mommas boy” to really hard challenges like defeating Godzilla wearing nothing but tighty-whities using only a BB gun at 13:37 on Christmas eve.
We all know that gamers sleep until 2pm so this is quite an amazing feat.
Like I’ve said in the past achievements as well as leaderboards can add a lot to a games replay value and the satisfaction of beating your friends high score and having it saved on an official list for everyone to see is sweet.
I’m not here to talk about the achievement system as a whole, more the negative side-effects of it all. The rewards. From “Gamer score” to unlockable items and pictures both in game and in some cases out of the games. I’m not saying this is a bad thing in itself but humans are the issue here. My gaming began on an old Commodore with the cassette tape reader and everything, LOAD’ing and RUN’ing my way through thousands of copied games on my mixtapes, Boulder Dash standing out as one of my favorites… What made me enjoy the game was nothing else than the sheer joy of squishing pixels supposed to be monsters with pixels supposed to be rocks.
Fast forward to today where games like Boulder Dash can be recreated by an 11 year old kid in a few hours and real games take years to create with huge teams and a lot of money yet I’m starting to see more and more gamers choosing what games they buy based on how easy these achievements are to get. Have these begun replacing the definition of a good game? For some people I think it has. It makes me a bit sad to see an amazing indie game get overlooked for one with an easy 1000 points.
“I did not enjoy this game so I rushed through it in about 4 hours for 1000 points”
This was all a guy had to say in a review of a game I was looking at. Does this qualify as a reason to buy a game? This guy seems to think it is. Maybe I’m just being cynical about what the average gamer wants but I truly hope our future isn’t all going to be the best glow effects, the most realistic water effects and the easiest achievements.
I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on this? Am I completely out of it? Comment!
