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.

How much better would this be were there an achievement (or bronze trophy) for each level if you got 90% of the loot, and a different achievement (silver trophy) for getting 100% of the loot? Now, not only is the achievement tiered, it also doesn’t prevent you from completing the level should you end up short at the level’s end.

Creating achievements for a thief game would be amazingly easy. Complete the game without harming any noncombatants. Complete a level without being detected. Shoot moss arrows into every pagan cornerstone. Steal 50,000 gold coins worth of loot. Complete every mission on expert difficulty (I’d be getting that one. Guess I don’t suck quite so badly at games as I’d thought) Although the game was released before the existance of achievements, it seems to be designed with them in mind. I guess achievements are here to stay.

Similarly, I’m playing an import version of Prototype that’s unable to log into GFW Live. Normally, this game does have achievements, but I can’t get at them. Since there’s no way I’ll be manually keeping track of how many infected I kill or how many vehicles I destroy, I can just forget about achievements entirely. I’ll still enjoy trying to get gold on every challenge, but there’ll be no record. It’s really odd that such a thing should even matter to me.

Microsoft did a hell of a thing when somebody there thought up achievements. Although born on the 360, they’ve come to be fairly ubiquitous amongst games today.

Not being an XBox 360 owner, my first real experience with achievements was in Team Fortress 2, which I tried briefly during its beta testing. Soon after that, the other players online became so much better than I that playing soon became an exercise in pain. I did manage to get five Team Fortress 2 achievements, but that didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment, and at that point I wasn’t trying specifically to get any of the achievements. I think the first time I started gunning for achievements was with Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Portal, where I did pretty well. I’m glad Valve started their own achievement system, and if they go back and put them into any of their older games retroactively, I’m all in to replay those games. But some of those are damn hard. Anybody who got the Little Rocket Man achievement has got way too much time on their hands.

My second achievement experience was with the Playstation 3’s “trophy” system. To be honest, most of them in games I’ve played are a bit lame. I’m picking up some trophies as I move through Dead Space, but I don’t even know what most of them are. I just note them passively as they appear. Oh, I just dismembered my fiftieth limb. Ooh. No big deal.

I’ve got to admit though, the addition of trophies to Pixeljunk Monsters is something I’ve very much appreciated. I still go back to that game from time to time. I’ve now successfully completed every level in the main game, and I’m working my way very slowly through the considerably more difficult expansion. I’ve got about a half dozen trophies, and every once in a while I’ll go back and add another, but they’re no cake walk either.

Fallout 3 has got to be my first legitimate attempt to collect every trophy in the game. I’ve got 81% of the game’s achievements, via Games for Windows Live. There are ten left that I don’t have. Four of them are from the Operation Anchorage expansion, which is lame because you need to shell out cash to get the achievements. Three of them are gotten by going through the game with a neutral character – something I’ll do if I ever play through again. One is “The Nuka Cola Challenge”. I’ve gotten 27 or 28 of the requisite 30 bottles of Nuka Cola Quantum, and the next time I feel like firing the game up, I can probably get that achievement quickly. And the last two, to me, are the hardest achievements in the game: Silver Tongued Devil, and Data Miner, which require you to succeed in 50 speech challenges and 50 hacking attempts respectively. The problem isn’t beating the challenges, it’s finding them. I’ve got somewhere around 30, only because I actively sought out everything I could. What a pain.

Mass Effect for the PC has achievements, but I haven’t given them much attention because they don’t connect to anything – I can’t link to a web page that shows them, and nobody I’ve added as a friend anywhere can see them. Kind of like PS3 trophies, which you can’t view online. It really makes you realize that achievements are all about showing off your accomplishments in video games. Too bad that 90% of the games I play don’t have them.