What’s new and what’s not in the latest trend in video games
by Wes Sonnenreich, Director of Innovation for Deloitte Australia
Videogames have become a mainstream form of gaming entertainment for much of the world. In their early days, scoring systems were simple – one point for each dot consumed by a voracious yellow circle, hundreds of points if the circle touches a fast moving blue blob under the right conditions, game over if it touches anything else. Today’s games have scoring and statistic-keeping systems that are as complex as those used in sports such as baseball, cricket and American football – particularly if the game is played among many people online.
One of the current popular trends in videogames is a system called “achievements”. These are frequent rewards for accomplishing tasks within the game environment that often have little to do with the primary objective of the game. For example, in a shooter game, someone might get an achievement for only playing with a pistol when everyone else is using machine guns.
Achievements can encourage players to try doing something that is otherwise not rewarded by the standard gameplay mechanisms. In the case of the above example, even highly skilled players would find that using a pistol exclusively would negatively impact their score and statistics. However, a player who retains an achievement by never using any weapon other than a pistol can justify their lower statistics, and even exclusively compare themselves to others who hold a similar achievement.
By engaging in non-optimal behaviours, players can often have a richer experience with a game, particularly in multiplayer environments. Once an “optimal strategy” for playing a game is discovered, those who use it dominate the game. This rapidly forces everyone to adopt the optimal strategy which often leads to boring, repetitive gameplay. However, well designed achievements can break this behavioural pattern and create a more varied playing experience. It can also lead people to explore aspects of the game that, while not optimal from a scoring perspective, may still be very fun.