I love gaming. And as part of gaming on the Xbox, you gain Achievement Points for things like finishing the game, or completing in-game tasks. The idea behind Achievements is that they show your relative skill and accomplishments at the video games you have played.
Unfortunately, Xbox Achievements have a number of issues that make them not only useless, but actually a bad thing in some cases.
Issue 1: Not All Achievements Are Created Equal
Each achievement has points associated to it, usually something like 10 Achievement points. Unfortunately, these points don’t seem to actually reflect the difficulty of earning them. You might get 10 points by slaying an insanely difficult boss in one game, but then you just have to watch the opening scene in another game for the same number of points.
In other words, saying that you have 10,000 points doesn’t really tell me anything about how difficult it was to get those points, or how skilled you are. You might have just watched the opening sequence in 1000 games. Big whoop.
Which is why there needs to be some standardization of the types of things points are granted for, and the relative value of those points.
Granted, you can look at someone’s profile and see what specific achievements they have earned to get their points. However …
Issue 2: Not All Achievements Were Actually Earned
I frequently see gamers meeting up in multiplayer sessions where they are supposed to be fighting each other, but instead they call a truce, and each allows the other player to kill them in all the various ways needed to get the achievements. Need to kill three opponents with a knife in less than 30 seconds? Just have three friends stand there so you can kill them with a knife. This does not, however, mean that you are badass or skilled enough to actually kill three people with a knife in less than 30 seconds in a game where your enemies are trying to kill you back. And it certainly doesn’t mean you have gained any kind of skill with a knife in real life. What’s the point in having the achievement if it doesn’t actually mean anything?
What’s more, achievement whoring is a huge investment of time for nothing. If you added up all the hours that some of these players sit around doing boring repetitive tasks so that they can cheat their way into a few more achievement points or get that last achievement in the game, it would be a large and very sad number. We’re talking the amount of time it would have taken them to complete a college level course, or learn to build amazing web pages, or lose 20 pounds and get tight abs, or learn to play the guitar (for real, not on Guitar Hero). But instead they have 1000 Xbox Achievement Points. Which brings us to …
Issue 3: Xbox Achievements Don’t Mean Squat in the Real World
First, Xbox Achievements do not grant you discounts on Xbox products and cannot be spent on items in the various Xbox online markets (with the recent exception of gaining some avatar items), and don’t even unlock special content or levels in the games themselves.
It is like going to a day job and being paid $1,000,000 dollars at the end of the week – but in Monopoly money! And then bragging about it! Yeah, you’re a millionaire dude. Wow. Congrats.
But more than that, much like those post-high school young adults who still live off of their parents so they can play World of Warcraft all day, most young adult console gamers I know have no actual achievements in their real lives they can be proud of. All they have are Xbox Achievements. All of their spare time and energy is spent on gaming. They consume but give nothing back, making neither their own lives, the lives of their loved ones, nor the world any better, and arguably making it worse by consuming without return.
One thing you can assume about someone with a very high Xbox Achievement score is that they may have no life.
In Summary
Again, don’t get me wrong, I love gaming, and if you play Xbox you can’t help but gain achievement points over time. Nothing wrong with that. Certainly, I understand that if you love gaming, then hey, doing nothing but gaming all day sounds pretty bawsome. But it’s a bit like masturbation – sure, it’s fun, but if that is all you do with your free time, well, that’s a problem. Life is about balance. As a human, you have higher brain functions you can use to not be the rat in the maze that keep pushing the button to zap the pleasure centers of your brain until you die a meaningless death.
And unless you are independently wealthy (or a game tester), then chances are you’d have to mooch off someone else to live a life of nothing but gaming. Or work a crap job and game with all your free time and doing nothing else with your life, which to me sounds like living a life of suck to fool yourself into thinking you are living a life of fun.
So assuming that you are not in a condition or situation that would prevent it, why not ALSO go forth and achieve something in real life as well, do something that is actually meaningful? Gain some Life Achievements.
If nothing else, perhaps you can get a job with Microsoft Games and make Achievement Points actually meaningful.
