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.

When I first saw Raptr‘s new ability to share the games you’re playing on Twitter and Facebook, I jumped right on board. More connectivity! Horray! It wasn’t until I heard a comment in a recent episode of the Brainy Gamer podcast that I began to question things. I’ve since heard it referred to as twitter videogame spam. That’s a filthy label to slap on anything. It simply hadn’t occurred to me before then that notifications such as “GHowley began playing Thief: Deadly Shadows” or “GHowley installed Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena” would annoy people.

PC World recently wrote an article about this very thing. Are Twitter updates from games annoying? Personally, I haven’t been annoyed by it simply because nobody that I’m following on Twitter or friends with on Facebook is connected to Raptr. I suppose I’d imagined that it wouldn’t bother me, but I suppose if I got tweets that said “ARockLegend is playing Madden 2009” eight times a day, it would start to bug me.

One of Uncharted 2’s big features was going to be Twitter support: It would do exactly what Raptr does, by automatically updating your Twitter account with gameplay accomplishments. But it seems that during beta tests, when the testers were updating their accounts with the completion of each chapter, somebody realized that it was kind of annoying to get updates with that frequency. Since the game is too close to launch to make the change and have it adequately tested, they’ve simply disabled Twitter support for chapter updates, and will patch the game later to make certain updates individually optional.

I’ve been procrastinating a bit, because it feels sad in a way to disconnect part of my social network, but I’m likely to disconnect Raptr from Twitter soon. Perhaps to compensate, I’ll code up that Raptr-powered gamer card I’d been considering. As soon as I get the time, that is. Raptr mentioned that they wouldn’t mind.

I’ve been toying around with Raptr for some time now, but it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that I really took notice. Their new desktop client, combined with their new gamercards and their use of Sony’s new PS3 API brings Raptr from a neat curiosity to a seriously useful application.

Their desktop application scanned my system and compiled a list of all games I had installed. Now, when I launch Thief: Deadly Shadows, Raptr automatically reports that I’m playing the game. No further action required on my behalf. While it grabbed all my Steam games and even all the crappy OS games like Freecell and Minesweeper, it did miss certain games. It couldn’t find Hexxagon and Pacman, both of which are swf files sitting on my C drive, and it missed my copy of Prototype, which was an import version. It also overlooked Fairway Solitaire. I sent a message to Raptr, asking for the ability to manually add games, but from the sound of it they don’t plan to have that functionality any time soon. Personally, while I can see it being a problem if somebody wanted to add obscure older titles like “Dark Earth” or “Tass Times in Tonetown” that might not be in their database, I can’t see why they wouldn’t let somebody manually add any old executable that might be on their machine and associate it with a known game in their database.

What I do love is the ability to add games that aren’t in any way online. While this won’t let the client automatically track the game in the way that XBox or PC games are tracked any time you play them, it lets me tell Raptr that I’m playing Scribblenuats and Final Fantasy XII, and for how long. This is one of my favorite things about Raptr.

Raptr also has the ability to handle multiple-client instant messenging in the same way that Trillian and Digsby do. After Digsby’s Processing-Theft scandal, (http://lifehacker.com/5336382/digsby-joins-the-dark-side-uses-your-pc-to-make-money) I may decide to use Raptr for IM at home. Raptr also has automation for downloading game patches, updating Twitter and/or Facebook with your gaming status, and coordinating for online play.

Raptr still doesn’t report accurately when you start playing Playstation 3 games, but I suspect that this may have more than anything to do with the information (or lack thereof) provided by Sony’s PS3 API. At least Raptr is able to track PS3 Trophies.

As you can see by looking in the left sidebar here, I’ve written my own gamercard software, but I have to update it manually. Now, for the first time, I’m considering replacing that with a customized version of Raptr’s gamercard. As long as I give Raptr.com credit, I can’t imagine that the guys over at Raptr would mind much.

It’s certainly not perfect. Although it’s showing that I played Fallout 3 just 2 hours ago, it’s saying that I haven’t played Pixeljunk monsters since November 15th, which is wrong. And although it accepted my Wii code, it’s not showing any of the Wii games that I’ve played recently. Still, the site is much better than it was a couple months ago.

Here’s the card.