The idea, at its core, was pretty simple: Developers would be asked—required, actually—to program a certain number of little tasks into all of their games. When players completed one, the 360 would play a pleasant sound—Plink!—a UI element would pop up telling users what they’d actually done, and a few points would be deposited into their Gamerscore, publicly visible to all their Xbox Live friends. And, just like that, Microsoft stumbled into the kind of social/psychological reward loop so compulsive and powerful that business motivators/behavioral psychologists/cult leaders/app developers have spent years trying to categorize it, often employing “dragged from the depths of corporate buzzword hell” terms like “The Octalysis Framework” to do so.
Some gamers went nuts immediately, of course: Races to achieve the highest possible Gamerscore kicked off pretty much immediately, as leaderboard-obsessed acolytes began playing increasingly execrable games simply to harvest them for points that would bulk out their, [sigh], “e-peen.” Others veered in a different direction, becoming priests of a new cult of purity. In 2008, a guy named Richard Stone launched the site TrueAchievements, which forswore the actual in-game point values of Achievements—set, we can only assume, by the lowest-ranked, least-busy-looking person in the office on the day Microsoft’s certification cops came around asking for them—and assigned “real” ones based on what percentage of players could actually achieve them. None of this was especially surprising to anyone who’d spent more than five minutes exposed to the default gamer psychographic, of course; getting players to give a shit about “scores,” and where theirs ranked in comparison to the guy next to them’s, was an idea as old as the earliest coin-op quarter-suckers.
But even away from those more extreme edges, Achievements and Gamerscore began to influence behavior on both sides of the player/designer divide. For consumers, it was easy to justify: If a game was available on both the 360 and another console, why not purchase it for the one that offered a little extra layer of game on top of the real one? (If players didn’t, on some level, like watching a machine react positively to their actions, the hobby probably wouldn’t have gotten hold of them in the first place.) For designers, the nature of the system—and its mandatory existence—was more complicated. After all, while a lot of games can be broken down into tasks that players are expected to accomplish, that relentless focus on success and being acknowledged for itran counter to many designers’ intent. Look, for instance, to the Achievements Toby Fox implemented when his best-selling Undertale, which operates at least in part as a rejection of completion-minded gaming, made its way to consoles, and was thus required to sport them; fully half of them center on the player dumping their money down a hole in pursuit of meaningless trophy hunting. Meanwhile, designer Christine Love triggered a very specific kind of gamer-brain rage when her 2013 game Hate Plus included an Achievement that was literally impossible to get, as a commentary on the players’ inability to fully control the game’s reality to match their whims. Players took this in a very normal fashion—which is to say, a small group of them started modding the game to bend it right back to their preferred reality.
In most cases, though, Achievements simply became part of the natural texture of gaming—especially after Valve’s Steam began implementing them in 2007, and Sony gave in and followed suit with its own Trophies in 2008. (Only Nintendo, which never met a “prevailing gaming trend” it couldn’t give some skeptical side-eye to, has held out—although individual games, like Smash Bros. and Mario Party, have cheerfully adapted their own smaller but similar systems.) Savvy designers understood that having an external way to talk to and motivate players opened up lots of interesting possibilities, whether for teaching new strategies, highlighting areas or mechanics off the games’ beaten path, or just for telling jokes. Valve, especially, mastered this stuff early on; by 2007, the company was already figuring out how to deploy an Achievement as the externally presented punchline to an in-game joke.
Achievements could teach players how to better use their tools; they could also just riff on the meme culture surrounding the game. Naughty Dog mocked itself in 2016 for Uncharted 4 freezing up during an infamous E3 presentation by including an Achievement for recreating the moment in the finished game; Dark Souls 2 played into its series’ own frequently overblown reputation for difficulty by popping a “Welcome To Dark Souls” Achievement on every player’s very first death. Occasionally, these touches could develop from simple gags or tutorials into what felt like a full conversation between developers and players. In 2007’s Bioshock, players get pressganged by a masked psychopath named Sander Cohen into murdering several people, then bringing him photographs of their bodies for his nutjob art projects. When players finally had a chance to take their vengeance on Cohen, more than a few sought artistic justice by snapping a pic of his corpse; when the game responded by popping the “Irony” Achievement, it felt like the creators at 2K Boston had read their minds. (Not that the team behind that currently dormant series was immune to using the system for dark humor, either: Bioshock 2 players who recreated the original game’s darkest moment by hitting a cardboard cutout of libertarian megalomaniac Andrew Ryan with a golf club were treated to a sort of sequel Achievement: “9-Irony.”)
In 2016, Microsoft announced that the Xbox 360 was being discontinued, having already made way, three years earlier, for its successor, the Xbox One. By the time the console was entering its sunset phase, though, its most lasting accomplishment had already metastasized into the wider gaming world: Achievements were everywhere, unavoidable, as built into the medium as options screens, or that thing where every game in the universe makes you adjust the light and dark settings on your TV by sliding the little bar until the skull is visible. But then, unlike so many other gaming elements, Achievements kept going, and finally broke containment.
The rise of smartphones, and online life in general, forced pretty much every company to become, in one way or another, a tech company. And tech companies love, above all else, to get you hooked: Strategies that made players more likely to want to keep pushing buttons on a controller turned out to be just as easy to apply to consumers thumbing their way through apps. Brands already associated with gaming adapted easily, naturally—Twitch currently frames its entire “get people to watch ads and we’ll give you some of the money” business model around pseudo-Achievements, using tiers of accomplishments with shiny little icons to encourage users to stream more, and more aggressively. (Productivity apps, meanwhile, are basically Achievements weaponized semi-benevolently in the service of drinking enough water, or getting enough sleep.) App life is, in many ways, Achievement life. The adaptable nature of the system is the point: Anywhere a designer wants users to alter their behavior—log in more consistently, click a little more often, use neglected features—Achievements are there to guide their thumbs. And the vast majority of these Achievements have none of the whimsy or humor of the original flavor, for all that they often seem, for some damn reason, to be accompanied by some flavor of cartoon bird. They’re simply acknowledgements that human brains are often fairly simple machines: Give ’em a task, the lightest incentive to fulfill it, and then watch the neurotransmitters do their jobs.
Which is a bit of a shame, if a predictable one. Because they’re weirdos and innovators, game designers have used the last 20 years of Achievements to do some really strange, really funny stuff: Rewarding failure, calling out their players for bizarre or unsavory behavior, or straight-up encouraging them not to play the video game in question for one full, human decade. Designers have even directly incorporated the system into their storytelling, as with Sam Barlow’s Immortality, which includes dialogue from one of its more enigmatic (and metatextual) characters as part of the Achievement text itself. Like so many other elements of game design, Achievements are a tool in the artistic toolkit—if an inherently intrusive one, prone to abuses. Microsoft wasn’t looking to rewire basic human psychology when they launched them, almost as an afterthought, as part of the wider Xbox 360 package in 2005. Nobody could have predicted, 20 years later, how that little “plink” would permanently worm its way into our brains.
