Although video game achievement systems have only cropped up in the past few years, the notion goes back to arcade games that displayed high score lists. Then, you’d enter three initials that would remain on the screen until someone else played the same cabinet game and got a higher score, or until someone unplugged the machine. Today, you have a persistent online identity that retains your score and your achievements.
What Makes Achievements Valuable?
At their core, achievements are about bragging rights. Having an online record of what you’ve accomplished in a game allows you to show off what you’ve done. Some people place the greatest value on gamerscore, some on completion percentages, and others like myself simply like to have a publicly visible permanent record of what they’ve been playing.
A big part of the value of achievements is that you have a single spot that collects information about multiple games – there wouldn’t be much value in the system that tracked only one game. So how much more value would there be if the system could track all games across all platforms?
What’s Out There
XBox is the major player in the achievement game. Your gamertag holds XBox achievements and gamerscore, and also ties directly into GFW live. Microsoft is the father of the modern concept of achievements, and they still have the most robust system. Sony is playing catch-up with their trophy system, but Playstation Home has been a miserable failure, and in general people seem not to value trophies in the same way that they value achievements.
The other major game consoles have no real achievement system: Nintendo has nothing comparable for the Wii or the DS, and I’m not aware of any PSP trophy system. Aside from GFW Live, which is a bit of a train wreck and certainly has a poor adoption rate amongst development studios, there is no good equivalent system for PC achievements. The best I’ve seen is Steam’s achievement system, but because it’s based on the Steam distribution platform, it’s far from a unified system for the PC. Valve games like Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, and Portal make great use of the Steam achievement system, but as soon as you talk about third-party games, Steam achievements are seldom implemented, and it’s nearly always possible for those games to play them on the PC without getting them from Steam.
To add to the confusion, Bioware and Blizzard have created developer-specific achievements. There are also non-networked achievements in some specific games such as Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Scribblenauts, and Desktop Tower Defense DS. Many in-browser flash games also now offer achievements.
Is A Unified Achievement System Possible?
The current achievement frameworks are console-based, distributor-based, and developer-based. It seems to me that any unified system for tracking gameplay and achievements would have to be internet-based with a web page front end. It could have a PC/Mac client, and could eventually have systems for integrating with consoles in the same way that Facebook and Netflix does, but it would need to originate on the PC.
Games for Windows Live had the best shot at accomplishing something, but they failed by providing a terrible user interface and by failing to persuade developers to adopt the Games For Windows standard for their games. It’s as if Microsoft placed no importance on Games For Windows, which is unfortunate since the onus of developing a coherent achievement framework would seem to fall to the creator of the platform: Windows.
The next best (last, greatest?) hope for a unified system is a service like Raptr. Raptr has done a good job of gathering information on gameplay from disparate systems, but it still has a long way to go. As a programmer, I understand: a large part of the problem is that Sony and Nintendo don’t make their information easy to access. And while Nintendo and Sony making this information available would enable huge strides forward in creating a unified system, it still leaves out any Windows games currently implementing Steam achievements or developer-specific achievements.
Going forward, Raptr should look to ps3trophies.com, as that site has succeeded in gathering Playstation 3 trophy information. If Raptr can duplicate what ps3trophies has done, it would be a big step.
In my dream world, somebody invents an open xml format for listing achievements, and that same format is picked up by the Playstation 4, XBox 720, Nintendo Foo, and whoever else wants to make use of it. Also in my dream world, naked women hand out free candy.
