Why do some people care for achievements?

Achievements. Why does anyone really care? I do not understand. Is it vanity? Or is it more like a bar of how high you manage to get? I expect some people will perceive this as a hateful thing, but that is not the case. I am trying to understand. Please tell me your thoughts. Thank you in advance.

And just because I can, I am going to say you get a "Forum Loser Achievement" if you are like me, making threads everywhere for things like this.

 

Because they provide goal posts and encourage the user to try something different, and also provide feedback to GLG (in Dredmor's case) as to which skills are being completed the most, how many players get to the end, so on and so forth.

 

Simple. You play a game, you beat it. You love it, but you've won. You want replay value. You want some way to show someone how badass you are at that game. You want achievements. Done, answer given, you want me, you call me, you know where I am.

 

But each of those things require the user to actively use a service like Steam. It seems a bit of a cumbersome way of doing things to me. And besides user feedback that can be accomplished in a plethora of ways, what else is there to it?

I can agree entirely to the part about it encouraging users to try something different. I would never have tried any melee skill whatsoever without mods that make them more useful, so perhaps accomplishments help in that regard especially.

By the way, per our other threads, I would like to say that you look especially beautiful today Althea!

*Edit* Essence beat me to a reply.

I am not sure I fully understand you Essence. Are you saying I should have simply asked you instead of asking here?

 

As you mentionned Omni, I think its part for Vanity in some case, part to motivate the player to push forward and part to add some fake extra gameplay time to a game.

IMO most of the achievements are stupid, and I wish they encouraged the player to try something new. But a lot of achievements are just " do the same shit a 1000 times", like kill 150 scorpions. This doesnt encourage any interesting behavior, this encourage boring farming. They get interesting when they challenge the player to do something difficult or in a different way. Stuff like "finish the game in hard mode" is fine. Or " finish the game without eating any food" too.Those challenge you to redo a game you might have finished and add some possibly interesting replay value.

One game with great achievements is the Binding of Isaac.
Why is it great ?
A bunch of the achievements are based on stuff you randomly find, why is it fun ? Because the game's design is to have a lot of short games that are always different. So its motivating to see that every time you play you achieve some new stuff and add to the feeling of progression.
But most importantly, its great because each achivement actually unlocks something in the game. They add content. There is a real reason to beat the challenge offered by the achievements.

If achievements were not encouraging stupid gameplay and farming, and if they were unlocking even tiny stuff like a concept art, I would bother doing them. RIght now, I usually dont give a damn.

On a last note, I hate how buncho games have achievements that SPOIL the story line if you read their title.

 

There are many reasons for that. Vanity, striving for perfection, competitiveness, replay value (though most achievements suck at adding it), and others.
But the most common one is, as you guessed, vanity (or, as I [and probably many others as well] prefer to call it, "e-peen"). People like being better than others, so getting an achievement when others hadn't (even if getting said "achievement" didn't really require you to achieve anything worth bragging about) is an ego-boosting event.

 

Since I made this topic to avoid polluting the RC5 discussion thread, I will reply to Hj-kos here instead of there:
I am not annoyed. I simply do not understand the ideas. I wanted to understand why it matters to others rather than presume that it is vanity/e-peen. And several here have explained it in a way that adds better motives for it that that.

Even if it were all vanity I would not really have a problem with it. But I would make many many unkind jokes if that were the only justification.

@blob
I think there is some credibility for the grinding/farming too. If there was an achievement for killing Dredmor ten times on GRPD, that would be a notable grind even if you never changed your character build.

I rather hated BoI. It was a twitchy game. (Meaning it required fast reflexes.) I simply cannot play those games anymore with any degree of skill. (Due to my seizure disorder requiring me to take a boatload of Phenobarbital daily, not to mention other issues.) I love roguelikes, but not if they are realtime.

I used to have an Xbox 360. I bought it new from my brother years ago and modded it before I even played it. (I hate the risk of damaging original discs, so it simply had to play backups.) I never really used the console though. I honestly had more fun disassembling it and modding it than playing it. But the point is that I saw the achievements.

They were almost all generic and uninspired drivel. There were a number of games that had very very easy to get achievements that could be farmed for points. (I do not recall what they called the points though.) The points were used in a variety of ways. But most of what I saw was sort of a "You must have this many points to play multiplayer" crapola.

Really, I saw games that has points for starting a game on "Easy" difficulty. I discovered that and had to start over to see if you got more for harder difficulties. You did. That told me they were worthless.

Now for years I have played a variety of games and will not ever pay any heed to that junk. It is beneath me in my way of looking at things. (I know that is a vain thing to say.)

 

Achievements are basically just giving people like me shiny gold star stickers for doing the silly pointless pants-on-head stupid things we would do anyway for kicks and giggles.

 

Perhaps, but Steam is currently the only place to get Dredmor w/ RotDG. Desura? Nope. If you're going to use Steam, and you have the resources, it makes sense to utilise Steam's features. Achievements are one of those. It is a way to garner feedback that does not inconvenience the players by making them fill out forms, and it is arguably immune to the bias of the communities. With a roguelike such as DoD, the stats are likely not as useful due to the idea of replayability (whereas a number of games do not have such a draw), but they can still get a rough idea of which skills are being taken more often and which skills may need to be looked at in order to make them more attractive.

With the silly achievements (killed by certain diggles, the lutefisk cube one, etc), it encourages players to just mess around and try things they wouldn't have even thought of. Who would have thought about putting a lutefisk cube inside itself? I certainly wouldn't have. But it also gives you ideas of fun things to do, and also prolongs the experience.

 

The idiotic achievements that plague a lot of games which reward you for the most mundane things like just starting the game, creating your character, pressing attack, catching a fish and what have you I can really do without. They're just an annoyance. I used to be against the whole concept of achievements as a whole because of the "fake reward nature" of them, but I've come to appreciate the game achievements that encourage different methods of gameplay than you'd normally go for, and also completionist achievements such as maxing all skills and learning all the monster lore in Final Fantasy 13, or clearing all the combo trials in super street fighter IV, to name a couple examples.

Then there's the humorous ones like a lot of the steam achievements in DoD, they don't mean anything or hold any importance, sure, but they're fun regardless. Was it in Half Life 2 episode 1 there's an achievement for carrying around a garden gnome found on the first level through the entire game and launching it into space? You gotta love stuff like that. Heck, anyone actually doing it definitely deserve a virtual pat on the back for it hehe.

 

Personally, I love the ones that emphasize the weird, bizarre or difficult. I'm totally the kind of guy who will say to himself, "How can I work it so I know that I'll die when I kick down that door?"

(A lot of acid traps and purity potions are involved.)

In fact, all of DoD's death achievements tickle my fancy. Otherwise, it's nice to browse them and think to myself, "What haven't I done yet?" For example, I realized I hadn't played with Psionics yet while scanning my achievements. Of course, I don't play mages much, but that's neither here nor there. The ones you get for doing a bunch of stuff I figure I'll get as I play the game. The random nature of the game is enough to keep me playing and if it wasn't there I wouldn't replay the game, no matter how many achievements there were. I'm not that much of a completionist. Sometimes I have to force myself to clear all 15 floors of RotDG.

 

Oh they did a second one ! haha, It's as brilliant as the first

 

Yeah, that's one of my points. The more bizarre/random achievements exist to get you to just mess around and/or have fun. In a way, ones like the door-related achievement are so bizarre that it takes a lot of thinking and careful play to achieve it.

A lot of games carry them now because of the consoles, simply put. The 360 has an achievement list - as I'm sure we're all aware - and I think with Sony updating the PS3 to have trophies and so on, developers have moved it to the PC too - especially due to Microsoft's GfWL platform and Steam's... uh... Steamworks platform. They have to factor them into the design, and I personally think it's just something that's caught on and is now an accepted practice.

I mean, there's been instances where I've gone back after finishing a game in order to get some more achievements - Batman: Arkham Asylum and Fallout 3: GotY come to mind. In fact, I think I'm on something like 1400 achievement points for Fallout 3 - and that's not exactly a bad thing. It's pushed me to play them for longer than I otherwise would, it made me find locations and try things I wouldn't have done typically.

If they unlock things in-game as they do in, say, Mass Effect 1 (e.g. combat bonuses), fine, but it's not something I - personally - need. Achievements are there for me to monitor my own progress and to see what I could do differently, but they also open my eyes to things I would otherwise have overlooked.

 

As a long-time developer of console titles, I have some very specific ideas about achievements.

1 - People play games which achievements longer, and more frequently, than games without.

2 - Player-centric achievements (stored in a profile, instead of in the game directly) help create platform loyalty. (If I have a huge gamescore on Xbox Live, I'm more likely to buy my new game on the 360 instead of for the PS3.)

3 - Achievements offer a sense of reward to most players. Used cleverly, the can help motivate players to work through difficult bits. (Players keep playing, and are more likely to play again, if they get rewards. Achievements allow the developer to grant rewards outside the scope of the actual game.)

4 - Achievements can help direct player behavior, exposing them to more systems. (Taste the rainbow and double rainbow in DoD are great examples of this. How many types of damage are there in the game? Oh, I guess it's 14. What are they? Which ones am I missing? - these are great questions because the draw players deeper into the game.)

These don't directly answer the OP question "Why do players like achievements?" But they pretty cleanly answer the more relevant question of "Why do developers include achievements in their game?"

 

The same reason why people climb mountains : "Because its there"

There is a common attribute among many human beings in the modern world, and that is being goal-oriented. There are good things to be said about that, but there's also a dark side to it. I used to be a whole lot more goal-oriented myself. I still am a bit, but not as much as in the past.

Goal-oriented people tend to be single-focused on completing whatever task it is they are working on. And when they complete that task, psychologically, they have a need to find a new goal to replace the previous one. Achievements aid such people in finding new goals. For the developers and marketers of a game, that's a good thing, because it gives a game a longer lifespan. Instead of simply playing the game until they are 'finished' with it, players can adopt further goals. They don't feel artificial like a self-imposed goal, since there is an actual 'achievement' attached to it, something that can make them feel good about themselves. Personal goals don't always have that. And for some people, of course, there may be a competitive aspect to that. I know, for example, that I have a bit of competitiveness in me. Many people do.

There is a dark side to being goal-oriented, though. Studies have shown that people who are goal-oriented tend to be a whole lot less happy than those who are more prone to 'go with the flow'. A problem with being too goal-oriented is that people like that tend not to take the time to appreciate their accomplishments, and are instead, always in search of the next goal. In other words, you can never be satisfied with the mileposts you've already passed, and need to always keep running for fear that if you stop, you will be a failure, in spite of what you've already done.

Also, I find that, normally, I play a game until I feel that I've played it out, which may be after one hour or after a few months. Continuing to play after that, in order to achieve some additional goals takes a lot of the joy out of a game that I may be better at getting out of some new endeavor, or I may simply be better off taking a break from a game at that point. But no, the achievements may keep me coming back in spite of my own best interests. Achievements can be like a drug, when you are a goal-oriented person. You know you want them, but you also know that you really don't need them.

 

I go after achievements which encourage me to try playing in a way I haven't before. A number of the Achievements in BFE are actually a lot of fun - beating Guardian of Time on Serious without dying, beating the entire game without reloading, sprinting, or aiming down the ironsights. Sure it has a number of stupid ones you'll get just playing through normally or by performing repetitive actions, but the point being that if they're used well, they add some replay value to the game.

 

Yeah I like the achivements of BFE too. Those pushing to perform melee actions are cool because they force you to get a bit closer of the ennemies which is a part of the fun and gameplay of the serious sam serie; Run into the middle of the action and survive.
Some also force you to search a bit like how to do a melee finish to a scrap jack.

Just met the guardian of time 2 days ago and I play in multiplayer... And it really sucks you cant save at all and have to redo the whole 1h30 long level when you get a totally confusing boss in the end. Wth...

 

Queen Hatshepsut is pretty nuts. I haven't managed it yet either - but it gives me something to shoot for.