Confessions of an Achivement Addict

by The Studio Geek · Published May 8, 2006 · Updated

My name is StudioGeek and I am an Achievement Point Addict.

They say admitting you have a problem is the first step in a recovery. Not that I want to recover mind you… To those of you who have a 360, you likely know what Achievement points are, but for the rest of you, let me explain. Achievement Points are in-game rewards for hitting specific milestones in the game. On some games it’s as simple as completing a level (King Kong), and on others the game expects you to play the game for 8 hours straight (GRAW), or as difficult as asking you to become the #1 ranked player in the world in the game (Tiger Woods).

It all started the month before I got my 360 – I was over at StarWarsGeek’s house and I had just converted my Xbox Live Profile to an Xbox360 Gold Profile. I played a game and I heard the most wonderful sound a gamer could ever hear – kacling! and a little symbol appeared at the bottom “Achievement Unlocked” – at the time I thought it was just one of those-in game things, but shortly there after I pressed the little Xbox symbol on my controller and saw that I now had 25 GP next to my name. How great! Now you can brag to the world how dedicated you are to winning games. Now little did I know at that time that people already had over 10,000 GP only a few weeks after the 360 launch.

Once I got my system all I concerned myself with was getting more GP (Gamer Points), I quickly realized games with less achievements to get in game [NOTE: All console games give a total of 1,000 points, and Arcade games give 200 – how many milestones and the value of each award is up to the game developer] meant more points per score. I quickly rented all the sports games since those came very easy to me.

I know now I’ll never be at the top of the achievements board since I have a job, a girlfriend, and a social life, but all I know now is that I must keep in front of the rest of the MG staff – click here to check out all of the team’s gamercards.

The whole idea was genius by Microsoft – bring back the arcade feeling of having to top someone else’s score and at the same time getting users to play games they may have never tried – just to get more points!

There are downsides like refusing to play your buddies online if there is no points in it for you (I’m sorry, I have a problem!), and insisting on surrounding yourself with checklists of achievements while you play, obsessively using a sharpie to scratch out the achievements as you get them.

Then there is my second favorite feeling in the world – getting 1,000/1,000 points and being able to ship my video game back to GameFly and being able to look at it as I place it in it’s envelope and can say “I dominated you”