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Wrong on so many levels
By Ahchay
I *love* the achievements thing. Really adore it. But this obsession with the score is taking away the joy of them for me.
Compulsive?
The reason why I love them is because they map out my game experiences. I only have to look through my list to see that I pretty much detested Perfect Dark Zero, or the Darkness, or Ghost Recon, or Hitman, but that I spent more time than is healthy acing DiRt, completing King Kong and plugging away at Prey. Or that I really enjoyed Gears but just couldn't finish the fucker.
Sure, I could go back to most of those and eke out another 2, maybe 3 thousand points. But I'd hate it. If that marks me out as some kind of gaming lightweight then so be it, but I do feel that I am, at least, an honest leightweight. My points reflect my gaming time on the 360, and they're a publicly viewable record of that time.
I quite often pull up the achievements list of friends, or even randoms who I'm playing against on XBL, in a way to see how closely their gaming tastes match mine. Someone who has aced all three Call of Duties, completed Super Hardcore Cunt Mode in Halo 3 and Gears and has struggled through to 100% EDF isn't likely to be a very compatible to my "play each game enough to enjoy it and then move on" way of playing games (whether of the video, board, card or sport varieties).
And this obsession with squeezing every possible achievement out of every possible game just doesn't sit well with that usage of the points.
I've given up looking at the list because of this, and I'm not entirely sure whether I really care enough about it to - even nominally - stay in it. I think I'd rather go back to my original "wonder how far Rocky's got in that game" usage to be honest.
March 2008
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