You’ve changed. You might not realize it, but you don’t play games the same way you did last year. Maybe you tried a little harder to reach the next rank in Burnout Revenge because you knew it contained a small reward. Maybe you stayed up a little later than you should have, just to bury a friend’s score in Hexic HD. Maybe you’ve beaten a boss in a game on another system and felt it owed you a trophy icon and a friendly sound effect for your efforts. You might be a bit reluctant to admit it, but Xbox 360’s system of Achievements really messes with your motivations as a gamer. Are you competing against the game, your friends, or yourself? Maybe all three.

It’s complicated further by your Gamerscore, the numerical by-product of Achievements. Each Achievement earns you a predetermined number of points, from as little as two (for co-op play in Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter) to as many as 400 (for 30 years of franchise play in Madden NFL06). The sum total of all your Achievement points is your Gamerscore. For the serious Xbox 360 gamer, life begins at five digits.

And quite suddenly, the Gamerscore has become the measure of your worth — a quantifiable coolness, the equation for ego. But whether you care deeply about cranking your online reputation or just like having proof of hitting a personal goal, the presence of Achievements has likely altered the way you play games on some level. They’re subtle, they’re seductive, and they’re a little spooky; and like it or not, they’ve hooked you, too.

For many gamers, the Hexic HD's Achievements were their first.

Who’s Your Daddy?
So now that a few hundred thousand gamers around the globe are obsessed with earning Achievements, who gets the credit (or blame)? “I can’t really put a single name on who first suggested the concept of Achievements,” says Microsoft’s Jerry Johnson, group program manager, Xbox Live. “It came about through many group brainstorms and morphed from quite a few concepts. However, the two individuals I most associate with Achievements are Michal Bortnik and Jeff Sullivan. Michal was the Program Manager who owned the feature on the Live team; he drove the concept through the entire design and development process. Now Jeff carries the torch, educating developers on how to think about using Achievements, while ensuring that the ongoing policy stays consistent and true to the goal.”

That goal, of course, is to reward players for pulling off elite feats and reaching milestones. It could be as simple as clearing a level or creating a player; it might be as complicated as unlocking everything in the game or delaying death for a ridiculous amount of time. If it takes effort, it’s a fine candidate for an Achievement. Or maybe it would make a better Badge? “Along the way, Achievements were referred to by a few different names,” reveals Johnson. “Trophies and Badges were some of the terms tossed around. We settled on Achievements because at the heart of it, that’s what we wanted them used for — to mark specific things that a gamer achieved in the course of play.”

Birth of an Achievement
Like gravity, Achievements aren’t just a good idea; they’re the law. “Achievements are mandatory in an Xbox 360 title,” says Simon Hallam, a producer and lead programmer at Reflexive Entertainment. “There’s a limit to how many Achievements a title is allowed to include based on whether it’s a retail or an Xbox Live Arcade game. Wik: Fable of Souls has 12 Achievements, but we had 20 that made it to the implementation stage before we chose the dozen that seemed like the best overall fit. Microsoft was very helpful in giving us some ideas about the type of Achievements we might want to include, but beyond that we had complete creative freedom.”

As an XBLA launch title, Wik: Fable of Souls forged an Achievement path.

That’s not to say rules don’t exist. “Full games must award at least five Achievements and no more than 50,” says Johnson. The maximum Achievement points for a full game is 1,000; the maximum Achievement points for an Xbox Live Arcade game is 200. Also, Achievements can’t be exclusive to individual players, like being the first to complete a game — anyone who makes it to the end credits must be able to reap the same rewards. “Other than that, we don’t dictate the exact criteria on when to award them,” Johnson tells us. “It’s up to the [game makers].”

More Gut Than Math
That developer-level creative freedom explains why playing all the way through Perfect Dark Zero on the lowest difficulty earns you a measly 10 points but merely finishing basic training in Call of Duty 2 gets you five times as many. “It’s more gut than math,” admits Zied Rieke, COD2’s senior lead designer at Infinity Ward. “One of the challenges associated with being a launch title is that you don’t have the benefit of seeing what worked in the past for new stuff like this, so you’re always going to have a few things that you would’ve liked to do differently. In retrospect, I’d definitely award Achievements for playing COD2 multiplayer and have more Achievements for single-player rather than just a couple of big ones.”

If Infinity Ward had to do COD2's Achievements over again, they'd be different.

While Achievements are ultimately arbitrary, they’re not decided without significant consideration. “We thought about several distinctly different groups of players who would be playing our game,” says Reflexive’s Hallam. “Beginners should be able to collect a few of the more basic Achievements and see that the points they earned aren’t insignificant. Casual/ intermediate gamers should be able to collect well over half of the Achievements. This really seems to have a positive impact on those players: no gamer really wants to be considered ‘average,’ and we want those players to feel great about their prowess, so they’ll keep coming back for more. We were concerned that hardcore gamers might be frustrated to see so many intermediate- level points awarded, but we discovered that they’re less concerned with the actual number of points and much more interested in whether they’ve collected all the Achievements. Messages that we’ve read in forums show that our testing in this respect was valid: ‘Did you get all the Achievements in Wik?’ ‘Yeah — I own that game.’”

Achieving Evolution
Bragging rights are nice, but how about a little something more? Some gamers have wondered if there will be real-world payouts for their virtual Achievements, but Microsoft’s official answer is no. “This is not a frequent-flyer program or a redeemable-points system,” says Johnson. “While you may see programs spring up in the independent community that focus on competitions around Achievements, the goal of our program was to simply design something that lets people collect, compare, and show off what they’ve done. We have no plans to alter that.”

However, gamers can expect some improvements to Xbox.com’s Achievements presentation in the coming months, and the system is always open for tweaking. “It’s important to note that Achievements have been out there for only a few months,” he says. “We still want to monitor how the program grows and not disrupt a good thing.”

And what a good thing it is. Websites such as mygamercard.net, xbox360tag.com, and achieve360points.com focus solely on Achievements and Gamerscores, tracking players, records, and trends in charts and leaderboards. “We thought Achievements were going to be positive, but we didn’t expect it to take off as quickly and as broadly as it has,” reveals Johnson. “Over a billion-and-a-half gamerpoints with associated Achievements have been awarded — and that was just in the first four months since the 360’s launch. The excitement in the community has definitely exceeded our highest expectations.”

The Crushing Blow of Pacifism
Ultimately, Achievements support the strengths of Xbox Live itself: a network of interactive gamers, aware of each other’s accomplishments, constantly in friendly competition. “Achievements on Xbox 360 are something quite different — and, in my humble opinion, more powerful — than any single game could normally offer,” suggests Hallam. It’s also fair to say that a rising Gamerscore offers a subtle, almost intangible reason to keep playing games on 360 regardless of what the competition may bring out in the fall. Rieke puts it more directly: “Achievements have proven themselves to be a critical aspect of the Xbox 360 and one of the things that will really influence who wins the next generation of console wars.”

Ready, set...don't shoot.

But until then, Johnson is happy that Achievements offer a fresh spin on gaming — they really can change the way you play. “In the end, it’s great to see titles that use Achievements to get people to play in new and interesting ways, like the Pacifism Achievement in Geometry Wars,” he says. “I mean, why else would someone spend hours trying to get through 60 seconds of play without firing a shot, if it wasn’t for the Achievement and 10 Gamerscore points?”