Hi fellow speedrunners
With a couple of friends we've been fiddling around with the concept of achievements in gaming.
In theory, achievements should encourage people to play games differently by creating constraints, or incentives to sidetrack.
However, our observation is that achievements are often (1) missing (2) tacked-on as an afterthough (3) not fun, grindy or just used to track progress of a population of players.
Community of speedrunners typically create their own achievements. Using time as a constraint is powerful because it is incredibly skill intensive and also involves trial & error on level design, items combination or finding an optimal path. Often speedrunners are the gamers that have the deepest knowledge of games.
But alas, most gamers don't have the mindset, creativity and dedication of speedrunners.
What we had in mind was to create a community based on unofficial achievements, that could be created or voted by anyone. Our assumption is that with enough popularity we'd be able to "convince" developpers to add achievements in their games...and at the very least, provide every type of gamer a way to appreciate a good game the way speedrunner do it.
To test that, we have created an instagram account posting unofficial achievements every day : https://www.instagram.com/dsrupt.games/
What do you think of the concept ?
@eltsyr "Our assumption is that with enough popularity we'd be able to "convince" developpers to add achievements in their games"
Hate to break it to you, but that's a terrible assumption. That will never happen for non-indie games.
Anyway, you'll probably get more useful information asking around in achievement hunting communities, since something like this will appeal to them a lot more than it will to speedrunners.
There's already a achievement website for older consoles: https://retroachievements.org/ They have a forum and discord, might be more useful to share it there than here.
Also, if somehow possible, create a better way to show these achievement, literally anything! Even Google Docs would work better than Instagram considering theres already a search function, Instagram could still be used for "advertisement" tho'.
- You are indeed correct. As in any software production cycle, once a product is shipped it's much more difficult, if possible at all, to add achievements. However on Steam it happens quite a lot. Also as video game industry is slowly moving as GaaS (Game as a Service) with longer development tails, we feel it would become more relevant.
- There are a few achievement websites out-there, but most of them are platform specific (trueachivements, retroachievements, etc.) and have limited UX or functionalities. We'd also like to put together a first version of the site that we have in mind. But yes, clearly we'll need to get feedback from those communities
- Thanks a lot for the retroachievements site, I wasn't aware of it ! I'm still interested in this community's feedback, in particular because i don't want to restrict myself to old games, and I like it here :)
- Instagram is at that stage a prototype to measure interest of people in custom achievements. We are developing a platform but it's currently in beta-test, and we felt that Instagram, although limited for interactions, is good to push content to see which games or type of achievements work well (so far it's Fornite lol...stop it already seems like it's the only game out there :()
In any case, thank you all for your precious feedback !
There is a reason that most achievements are grindy and boring.
There is a very well tested psychology to how games are designed, loosely based on giving a player dopamine hits for completing tasks and making progress. It turns out that making progress- whether in a game or in life- is EXTREMELY ADDICTING. The idea of progressing or improving is a powerful motivator, and this is how achievements initially emerged. Ideally, they could be a way to encourage people to play games differently by creating constraints, but game devs quickly learned that that's not what most people want. If it involves more work than it's worth, most gamers don't even bother going after an achievement. After all, they get just as much of a hit for getting achievements in other games, and there are plenty of games out there.
But we're not most people.
I think you'll find that just about every game here already has achievements in the form of "categories". The difference is that we don't just award people for "doing the thing", but we tack on the additional award for "doing the thing the fastest". If you look at it from that perspective, these achievements / categories are, in fact, chosen by popular vote, and if you peruse the site a bit with this attitude, I think you'll find that your work is already done for you.
I don't really personally like achievements casually I don't care for them that much most the time its just a little you did this text message, only game I really care for it is princess maker because I can track what wife my daughter became etc without having to write it down. I think competing the game is enough and 100% makes me feel extra awesome. I know many may not think like this but as this view point wasn't expressed yet I thought it would add the conversation :)
In a speedrun setting though like oddtom said knowing you pushed yourself to go fast and if you ever get WR is pretty cool.
@oddtom : I agree, most players actually aren't looking for alternative ways to complete a game. Like most players don't care to complete the game as fast as possible. Like most people prefer crappy action movies. But today in industry the word "gamification" seems to be everywhere and, as a lover of videogames, I feel like pushing gaming mechanisms everywhere would be a nice move. You're probably familiar with the Bartle classification but different types of achievements cater to different types of gamers, and, in particular with sandboxes, lots of gamers are trying silly stuff just for the sake of beauty.
@MelonSlice : Yeah, games should ALWAYS include an online leaderboard with fastest completion time. With everything online this would be sooOOoo easy to do :(
Achievements are very easy to cheat, you just open the game in gdb or whatever and trigger the function call for the achievement you want, would you need video proof of this achievements? If yes then it could actually be a nice community, but if it is just a board with the names of the users that got them then no point.
@Capuno : that's a fair point we are discussing with the team. On the opposite of the spectrum, you have "official" sites which take achievement proof very seriously, such as twingalaxies.com or say youtube. This requires a sort of peer validation that is frankly quite difficult to organize and arbitrate. On the other hand, you have boards with no proof, which I agree with you bring little value. What we wanted was something "lighter" like a screenshot/photo if possible, video if not, and a description of the strategy employed. A full run of dark souls is clearly a pain in the ass to review in any case, so a screenshot seemed a good compromise, and a little text seemed also a nice way to encourage people to talk to each others. If we implement a sort of voting feature, this would enable a selection mecanism that could possible strike the right balance between validation and arbitration, using the community (everyone loves to give his opinion :D)
I've been thinking about this a bit longer to try to figure out why the idea of achievements bothers me, and I think it has something to do with being told what to do. Setting an achievement puts a cage around what you can do and, sometimes, how you can do it. I like thinking that anything is possible and that there's always another, better way to do a thing. If I'm trying to win Fortnite with a Pickaxe, I want to do it because I don't really know if it's possible, not because someone told me to do it.
Running with your thread above and gamers trying silly stuff just for the sake of beauty, if someone decides that they want to play Minecraft by building a Statue of Liberty, that person is going to make it the biggest and best Statue of Liberty possible because that's what the motivation is. However, if an achievement was then made for "building a statue of liberty", it will draw a crowd motivated by gaining the achievement rather than the statue itself. These players will experiment with what the minimum requirements for a statue are in-game rather than taking pride in the statue itself, and soon, we'll be seeing 3 block statues of liberty pop up everywhere. These statues are rewarded the same as one that is more massive and detailed, and it can take the air out of the original idea.
Like @Capuno stated above, when you create achievements, it draws the crowd that is only motivated by the achievements. There are a lot of people motivated by getting as much as possible with as little work as possible, and if you go for something "lighter", you're going to draw more cheaters because something "lighter" is much easier to trick and fool. Yes, it's a pain to review an entire three hour run, but you get what you give, and screenshots are extremely easy to fake. If you put in the work to review every submission, you're going to have a much more credible leaderboard.
@oddtom : thanks a lot for your insight. I pretty much have to agree with everything you said :) Although if I built a massive statut of liberty i'd certainly be interested in challenging my friends to do the same, and then compare results :D I think fundamentally, the speedrunning community is very creative in setting their own personal milestones, but specifically because lots of people are a bit lazy, giving them pointers might appeal to a certain population.
This is actually how low to middle-management is structured : people who can set themselves goals and reach them autonomously are usually promoted to management roles, and people who can't or won't are often quite happy to have that work done for them.
That's it, I've said it : speedrunners should lead the gaming community XD