Gee Ch. 3 Response: Achievement Unlocked!!!!!!

Oh boy! As soon as I got to the part in Chapter 3 of Gee and saw the achievement principle I knew what I wanted to talk about for this week's response. It is safe to say that if you were to ask any of my close friends about me and achievements, you'd get a response like "oh boy how many has he gotten now?" or "What? Did he get to 100,000 yet?" I have been playing on Xbox 360 since the release of Halo 3, which was back in September of 2007. Since then I have played over 180 different retail and arcade games on the 360. I have played games like Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Castle Crashers, and many more. I was first hypnotized by achievements back when I played the game Dead Rising. Still to this day, I have yet to find a game that rewarded me as well as this game did for obtaining its achievements, and I'll explain why. With games on Xbox, each achievement is assigned a score that goes into a player's overall gamerscore. These achievements are (generally) given value based on the skill level required to obtain it. So in case you aren't following yet, an intro stage may land you 5G of gamerscore where beating the game on the hardest difficulty may land you somewhere in the 100-150G range. People go nuts over what achievements are attached to certain games, and for some people (and yes I will admit I do this sometimes too), they won't play some games simply if the output of the gamescore they think they can acquire isn't worth the time. I do this very rarely, but it has happened with some games that I have considered playing. One example recently is the game Dark Souls. I have only heard bad things about this game in the respect that it is very hard to obtain the achievements and only if you really want to spend the time playing the game should you get involved. I heard the game is good in regards to the content, but I have chosen to opt out simply based on the time and frustration I will be avoiding by not playing it. Wow, completely lost where I was going, oh right Dead Rising. Now in this game, all the achievements were worth 20G, and since there were 50 achievements it totaled the 1000G that comes with retail games. This meant there were some really easy achievements that you could get right off the bat and I obtained a higher gamerscore to start because of it. But this also meant that the really hard achievements, where there were a decent amount, were also only worth 20G, but overall it evened out. As I played the game I soon discovered that I had unlocked some in game items from completing some of these achievements, and this is where my addiction started. I soon found out that completing the "Zombie Genocider" achievement resulted in the player obtaining a MegaBuster (Megaman's cannon) for use in the game. I had to kill the population of the area the game took place, which was 53,594 zombies in the course of one play through. It is safe to say I spent at least 15 hours driving a car into the parking garage area of the game and farming zombie kills until I got it. After obtaining the weapon, I felt like I was invincible, and this leads into how the principle is defined. We find value in obtaining these achievements to meet our needs as gamers. The only disappointing thing about me getting this item was my assumption that all games took on this meta. WRONG!! Now I will say that some games award players in game items, armor, etc, but it never felt the same (in my opinion). Game have been getting better with allowing players a secondary reward from completing achievements. Players can also now be rewarded with in game items from doing tasks that aren't combined with the game's achievements. An example is with Halo 4, completing the in game commendations will unlock you armor that can only be obtained this way that aren't linked to any achievements. Some of these challenges can be more difficult then completing the hardest achievement for the game. I still enjoy finding games that unlock me as a player in game items and it continues to drive me to play each game more to unlock these items, obtain the gamerscore, and further the overall score of my account to show that I am a hardcore player, and I'm glad that there is a way to show that off sometimes, and I mean it when I say "sometimes" :P