While playing through Half-Life 2: Episode 2 I noticed
something new. Tiny gray squares would
pop up in my vision every once in a while and inform me of an achievement. Usually, these achievements would involve
moving forward slightly in the plot.
Congratulations! You found
Alyx. And a Vortegaunt. Fought off waves of antlions. Located all of the caches. Launched a gnome into space.
The tide that X-Box 360 owners had been contending with for
some time was inserted into the PC gaming world. Suddenly, achievements began to creep into my
games, slowly but surely, until they overtook the genre and began appearing in
nearly every game I played. Suddenly
each level, each interstitial in game-dom, was being demarcated by an
achievement. Valve began backtracking
and adding these achievements to earlier titles. Other PC developers began to include them in
their games, and the presumption emerges that nearly any multi-platform game,
by merit of Microsoft’s requirement that achievements be added to games for
X-Box certification, would almost certainly have achievements attached to it.
And thus I began to have to contend with achievements.
They’re an interesting concept, especially when they’re used
to denote the completion of an especially challenging action in a game. Those achievements serve as a marvelous
badge, a sort of bragging right attached to the game, displayed for any friends
who might have the game as well to see that yeah, you killed that Juggernaut in
Call of Duty 8 with a knife and yeah, you completed that Portal map in just two
moves. Even game-completion achievements
are, in a sense, worthwhile, providing you with a neat little feather to place
in your digital cap to denote that you’ve completed a game. Kudos, sir, you endured The Witcher 2 and its
punishing epilogue. You beat Bioshock
and, thus, are qualified to discuss Bioshock.
You beat Assassin’s Creed 1, 2, 2.5, 2.5 2 and 3. You endured Mass Effect 2’s storyline. You achieve a certain ending in Fallout: New
Vegas.
But these “game completed” achievements have some ugly
siblings: the “section completed” achievements.
These achievements, while denoting game progress, insert themselves into
the gaming experience in an immersion breaking wop wah moment, like a foghorn
telling you “THIS ROUND IS OVER, HAVE FUN IN THE NEXT ROUND!” Sometimes it’s not so bad, in games with
clearly defined levels like a Call of Duty, a Left4Dead or a Warhammer 40K:
Space Marine. But more often than not it
seems that these achievements insert themselves into open world-esque games, or
games that attempt to eschew solidly established level demarcation. Borderlands and Deus Ex: Human Revolution
both fall into this camp, where they mimic a level-less structure in their
presentation (while retaining a strongly linear level structure and
progression) and then include achievements that upset or interrupt the effect
of this non-linear presentation. It’s
distracting, particularly in The Walking Dead, where it seems totally
unnecessary. Do we need to know that we’ve
one eighth the way through this grueling experience? I understand: these achievements exist
because they’re necessary for XBLA certification, but I remain irrationally
angry at their presence.
There’s only one scenario where I find these achievements
especially interesting: when they’re compared over a large group. Steam started doing this very, very actively
(and with some nifty non-achievement oriented data) following Half-Life 2:
Episode 2. They provided interested
players with a means by which to see how their personal achievements stacked up
with the rest of the community, allowing players to see a side by side
comparison of the achievements they had and the achievements the rest of the
community who owned the game had, broken down by percent. Using this comparative overlay you could see
the percentage of players who actually finished Episode 2, the percentage who
hunted and killed every grub in the game and the percentage who played about
halfway through the episode and then gave up.
An interesting overlay of data, to be sure. Heck, Valve even went a layer deeper,
presenting players with nuanced information on places where other players died
frequently, spent most of their time and generally travelled. All cool info, not necessarily relevant to
the game experience, but interesting to consider. In an optional setting.
The first few episodes of The Walking Dead game utilized a
similar framework. After you completed
each episode you’d get a breakdown of a handful of decisions that you and other
players were asked to make. You’d see
how people chose to act in a case-by-case basis. It wasn’t too intrusive. It was even interesting to see the decisions
that people overwhelmingly favored (like helping a child instead of helping an
adult beset by zombies) and the decisions that people were more or less evenly
split on (saving a gregarious, nerdy guy instead of saving a pragmatic, pretty
woman). It added a layer of depth to the
decisions that came before. Paired with
comparison videos that popped up on Youtube in the days to come which
illustrated other statistics (including the number of times a truly vile
character was punched in the face) it made for a cute sort of “metastory”
surrounding the game: the tale of how people played it.
But this was broken in the most recent Walking Dead episode,
mostly by a decisions to, at the end of the game, showcase the members of your
party who chose to remain with you at the end of the episode. I can understand why this information is
there. It’s a big decisions. But it exposes facts to players who might’ve
chosen to play in a certain way that other, delicately arcing paths exist and
that other paths are permanently closed.
It effectively undercuts a complicated narrative that is carefully woven
through the seemingly binary choices that Episode 4 of The Walking Dead presents. Characters who can be left for dead are
announced as potential party members, eliminating any sense of consequence
associated with leaving those characters behind. The option to go alone also presents itself,
making me wonder if there’s a way for me to achieve “maximum asshole” and go
alone on the last leg of my journey.
This is metadata that recasts the play experience, rather
than providing a player with a sense of how others experienced it: it’s the
kind of information that spoils the coming episode in its presentation, since
characters absent from this list of potential party members are almost sure to
be present in episode 5 (if they’re not, I’ll be shocked, to be honest).
This is the kind of information that doesn’t just interrupt
play: it hints at play that is yet to come and recasts experiences that players
have had in a new light. It represents
the game in a new light, a light that exposes a number of branching choices otherwise
seemingly purposefully concealed within the game’s framework. It undoes some of the tension of the episode
and gives me information without context.
It’s one thing to tell me if I chose to kill a cannibal. It’s another thing to tell me how other
players, as a general class, chose to interact with their party members without
context for their decisions, without nuance, with just a general overview
informing me of the potential situations you foresaw. There’s something easy
about that that rubs me the wrong way, something somehow more insidious than
the act of presenting me with textual nods outside of the game’s context during
each scene break.
I love me some meta-data, but I prefer it outside of my
game, where it can’t color my experience.
That’s why it’s meta-data and note game feature.
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