Achievements Unlocked

At this year’s DICE Summit, Jesse Schell, a technology professor at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon Institute, gave a talk called, ‘Design Outside The Box’. It seemed purpose-built to cause a sensation. Schell contended that the most popular gaming trends of today owe their success to the way they “break into our reality”. Facebook games, Club Penguin, Wii Fit, Guitar Hero, Xbox Live Achievements; each one is designed to bleed into our everyday lives, and few predicted the success they would enjoy from doing so.

Schell contended that their popularity is a sign of the way that game-like elements will be absorbed into the real world from now on. He outlined a future where sensors mark every surface; where kids are awarded points by Colgate for brushing their teeth, or for paying attention to specific adverts. In some sense, every humdrum activity will take on some degree of interactivity, and life will become a game. It was the kind of self-consciously provocative talk that is all the more appealing for being so groundless – impossible to prove, impossible to deny. The internet lapped it up.

However, despite using a range of gaming phenomena as a springboard for his flights of fancy, Schell didn’t linger on their immediate implications. Enter Chris Hecker, a former Maxis designer who is considered one of the very best speakers on the event circuit. At the San Francisco Game Developer’s Conference, he explored the psychological effects of giving people rewards that aren’t intrinsic to the activity being performed. In Schell’s future, this took the form of points for brushing your teeth or drinking Dr. Pepper. In the world of the contemporary gamer, they take the form of the Xbox 360’s Achievement points and PlayStation 3’s Trophies.

Hecker was under no illusions that his research would be greeted with suspicion. As Schell pointed out, gamers are “insane” for Achievements and Trophies, and few would have even considered that there could be a possible downside. However, given that the talk was called ‘Achievements Considered Harmful?’ Hecker was obviously ready to question that assumption.

Drawing from a wide array of research studying the impact of different kinds of incentives on performance, Hecker posited that the rise of Achievements, Trophies, and similar ideas being developed by third-party publishers – Ubisoft’s U-Play, for instance – could lead to a “nightmare, self-fulfilling scenario” that disrupts the feedback loop that helps designers to create better games.

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