"I Would Rather Be Applauded Than 'Achieve'"

[kane_magus]

As far as I'm concerned, virtual applause is even more meaningless than achievements/trophies, and I already (mostly) don't care about those. (Besides, the Super Smash Bros games already had the virtual crowd reactions thing long before Super Mario 3D Land, so this isn't really anything amazing and new either.) I mean, it's not something that will prevent me from playing a game, obviously, but it's still something that simply doesn't matter to me, outside of when it gets explicitly talked about in articles like this.

If people feel like they must have achievements or applause or whatever in their games before they feel like they're worth their time to play (and some of the commenters under that article explicitly and depressingly stated this was the case), then, well... I feel like that's just one more bullet point to go on my "Things I Find Sad And Wrong About The Video Game Industry/Community Today" list. A minor one, mind you, but it still goes on there. If playing the game isn't innately its own reward, then perhaps they should reevaluate why they play video games at all to begin with.

Really, I've long felt that people actively seeking out incredibly crappy games that they otherwise wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, just because those games allow them to get easy achievements scores, is bad enough. But if the opposite is true and people are actively avoiding games, no matter how awesome they may be, merely because they don't have achievements... well, that's even more retarded, in my not at all humble opinion.

Also, on a related note since it was mentioned in the article/comments as well, I think the very concept of being able to redeem achievements for tangible, real life rewards is an abominable one, and I hope it never becomes a realit- oops, too late. Huh... it never really occurred to me until this moment, but... why does it seem like it's Ubisoft lately, more so even than the more likely suspects of EA or Activision, who are the ones actually pioneering a lot of these incredibly terrible new ideas such as this and, of course, the always online DRM crap that we've seen way too much of lately? Seriously... Ubisoft came up with that asinine always-connected-even-for-singleplayer crap, and people justifiably went apeshit over it. But later, Blizzard comes along and does pretty much the exact same thing, and yet now people are actively defending their decision to do it as though it's all of a sudden somehow a good thing just because it's Blizzard doing it. What the hell?! The Uplay achievements-for-rewards thing isn't nearly as obnoxious as the always online crap is. Why couldn't the others have latched onto that, as dumb as it is, rather than the other, which is many orders of magnitude worse?

Comments

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that I like trophies and achievements a lot, although I don't really care about my total trophies (so I'm not interested in buying games in order to get "easy" trophies). I guess I just like having some tangible way to see what you did in a game, and it gives a tiny bit of extra incentive to get the extra endings or finish the sidequests, or whatever.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have no problem with the idea of achievements in and of themselves. They're harmless. Aside from when I see articles like the above explicitly talking about them, I normally don't even think about them, good or bad.

It's just all the people out there (and people that I know personally IRL who talk about it frequently) who seem to think that their achievement score is much more important and worthwhile than the actual games themselves that makes me facepalm. Especially when they're gaming the system by buying or renting a shitty game for a few minutes just to get a quick 1000 point boost, or worse, are actually outright hacking their gamerscores. The new twist on it for me when reading that article was, again, the guy in the comments saying that he doesn't play older games without achievements specifically because they don't have achievements, as he felt he'd be wasting time better spent playing games with achievements. That is just sad. I really shouldn't let it bother me, and usually I don't (e.g. I've learned to mostly tune out the IRL guy who goes on about achievements when he starts in on them), but every once in a while an article like this comes along and makes me sad all over again.

[hikarugenji.livejournal.com]

One thing I like about the PS3 Trophy system is that it puts much less emphasis on a "total score" and much more emphasis on accomplishments for each individual game. It is possible to see your total trophy count, but it's not plastered at the top of your login screen or anything like that. I've seen people talk about how many games they've Platinumed but I've never seen anyone brag about their total number of gold or silver trophies.