This was originally posted on the now-defunct Random Fury! videogame blog.
Achievement Unlocked! How nice is it when you hear that little bleep bloop, and the grey rectangle with rounded ends pops up telling you how many Gamerscore points you just acquired? Some see them as arbitrary, random or pointless. Together, a meaningless number that is unbalanced and open to abuse. While others see it as their legacy, they work for it, and to them it is now an integral, essential part of videogames. They have built up so much Gamerscore or so many Trophies that they simply must continue, and it’s a reason why they could never switch platforms. This is an argument for another time though, because right now I am here to talk to you about this Flash game which features no real objective other than to earn Achievements.
It is a metagame about metagaming.
You play as an elephant and you can do all the usual game-y stuff like moving and jumping, only in this game you get Achievements for performing these mundane actions. While there are no enemies, you can die – usually due to the two sets of spikes in the room – but dying is not a fail state. You will be rewarded for it with an Achievement. Probably more than one if you die so many times, or can get five elephant corpses on screen at once floating in the grav-lifts, or impale yourself on every single set of spikes. There are Achievements for touching every block, there are secret areas for Achievements, a hidden area for an Achievement, areas you need to touch for a completion Achievement, areas which you have to visit in certain orders for Achievements… You get the idea.
At first I thought this game was simply a parody of an element of gaming culture that the Xbox 360 invented, but the more I played, the more I changed my mind. My viewpoint upon first playing was that this is a straight up mickey-take because I earned about 12 Achievements just by starting the game. This was reinforced by being awarded “Achievements” for moving left, moving right, jumping, staying alive for ten seconds… But the amount of thought that must have gone into the wide variety of late-game objectives surely proves that Achievements can add life to a videogame if done in a responsible manner? Either way, this game will reinforce your view that Achievements are bad, and that traditional elements of electronic entertainment such as killing bad-guys and levelling up are what videogames are all about, or it will prove that with a bit of imagination you can even turn a bland, nearly empty room with none of the previously mentioned videogame tropes into something that is challenging and entertaining with arbitrary, random or pointless objectives.
Have a go for yourself, here’s the link: http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked Do let me know what you think.
Amazingly, this has spawned two sequels. The second game naturally adds in a lot more Achievements and a couple more rooms. You can play it here: http://armorgames.com/play/6561/achievement-unlocked-2
The third game adds more Achievements, more rooms, a storyline, and to be quite honest I feel it undermines the joke which the first game delivered so expertly. You can play it here: http://armorgames.com/play/13196/achievement-unlocked-3
