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 ?

Hi everyone !

I'm a child of 12 in the body of a man of 40. I'm french, and was born during the best moment in humanity : the NES/SNES era and the fantastic growth of video games, which have basically taken over my life ? I'm also the proud father of 6 kids, 2 of them are lost to the cause and are spending my salary in Fornite VBucks. But 1 of them is building 16-bits sprites in hama-beads, collecting retro-consoles and speedrunning Shovel Knight in about an hour. He has something like 3000 hours of playtime on Terraria. He is THE chosen one...when I die needless to say : he gets my collection of rare video game figures. We've been watching documentaries about video games for a while now : King of Kong, Halfcoordinated, the youtube channel Summoning Salt, lots of stuff about esport and video game culture in general (noclip and from bedrooms to billions are some of our favorites), and although my speedrunning days are long gone -used to clear megaman & sonic quite fast, though- I always found that the speedrunning was the quintessence of video games : whereas most esport athletes are in for the money and glory, speedrunners are in for the beauty, making speedrunning a form of art. I am currently in charge of esport in one of the main european investment bank, which, under the impulsion of my team, was the first to sponsor a european League of Legends team. Mainstream esport may have the spotlights and investments, but speedrunning is my first love, and with a couple of friends, we are experimenting something around non-official achievements. This is a bit of an early stage, but my intuition is that speedrunning communities have long been creating their own non-official challenges, and I feel that feedback of the community here might be valuable when we have something to show. Hence my introduction :) My favorite games on the scene are any Zelda & Megaman, Spelunky, while more recent titles would be Cuphead and Celeste.

Glad to be among you !