The Muskrat Ramble

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.

Achievements in and of themselves are not new. They’re no different than tracking individual statistics of an athlete and celebrating when some otherwise arbitrary milestone is achieved (e.g. when a player achieves a “century” or, conversely a golden duck in cricket). They may have little or no impact on the overall progress of the broader game, but they can add little bursts of excitement throughout. These are particularly welcome when the game goes through a “stagnant” period where nothing much is happening. They can keep people in their seats and engaged even after the overall outcome is a foregone conclusion. They also can be a motivator to a player – many athletes are driven throughout their career with the hopes of achieving a record or a series of significant milestones. Having the right achievements can even translate into an increased salary and better sponsorships.

Why do we keep score?

Life is primarily about survival; but once you’ve got survival in the bag, life is about how well you’re surviving. Money, social status, possessions, leisure time and happiness are often used to figure out how well you’re doing at the survival game. Associated with each of these concepts there are many complex and interrelated methods for “keeping score” and “mini-games” that are played around these scores.

Games are a simplification of life. Games take the unbounded chaos of life and create rules and boundaries so that a “winner” and “loser” can be easily determined within a reasonable timeframe. For example, chess is a simplified match up of two armies. They’re given equal resources and starting capabilities (which is unrealistic), and held to a set of very prescriptive constraints (e.g. a white pawn can’t suddenly go guerrilla, camouflage as a black bishop and headshot the black queen from a sniper perch behind the chess clock[1]). A chess game can end with a winner, loser or a draw. Unlike life, as soon as a draw is recognised, both sides accept it and move on to the next game.

The relatively simple nature of games allows us to come up with easily understood “scoring” systems for individual games, collections of games and the players of the games. In the simplest of games a victory occurs when one player achieves an objective before or more skilfully than the other. In a series of these games, a player’s overall score is the total of their wins. In more complex games there may be a number of parallel scoring systems; some which affect the outcome of a single game, but others might be relevant in an extended series of games.

As games become more complex, so does the potential for developing complex scoring systems. Keeping score can be a game in and of itself; fantasy leagues create games based on the performance of players of other games. Many sports fans spend hours keeping track of dozens if not hundreds of statistics associated their favourite teams and players. Every time there’s a new game, these statistics change and the fans can look forward to hours of debates about what the long-term implications of each moment of the game means for each player, each team and the future of the sport itself. Just read the back few pages of any daily newspaper if you don’t believe me.

What is new and exciting is the concept that an achievement earned in one game may change the experience in a different game. Right now, this has been mostly implemented in games that are part of a series, for example achievements earned in Gears of War 1 unlock new abilities in Gears of War 2. However, soon this is likely to expand into games that are less closely related. To go back to the sports analogy, this would be equivalent to allowing a cricket player who achieves a century to play a game of baseball using their cricket bat. He may or may not want to actually do that, but it opens up an interesting variation that wouldn’t be available to other players.

The reason this works is because the major game platform companies (Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo) have created standards for how achievements must work within games for their gaming platforms in order to receive certification. This standard ensures compatibility among achievement systems and thus paves the way for inter-game achievements. Of course, there is no compatibility at this time between the three systems and given the history of those three companies, it’s more likely there will peace in the Middle East than a common standard.

This is a very powerful model that leverages the ubiquitousness of standardised networked information systems. Similar types of models are emerging outside of the videogame world. Profiles generated on social media sites such as Blogger, Digg, Facebook, and Flikr all are becoming interconnected. A person’s social status and social web “achievements” in one context can carry over to the other sites. For example a blogger can have their blog appear on their Facebook profile page. Garnering more “friends” on Facebook can lead to increased readership and visibility of the blog. This is starting to get very close to the inter-game achievement model, particularly since some people consider collecting a large number of “friends” on Facebook to be a game.

There is an enormous potential for this model to be applied to the workplace and educational environments. Most of us engage in many activities during work or school that are “extracurricular” – on the job training, community service, participating in office sporting teams, playing in the school band, etc. We also occasionally accomplish things that go above and beyond the expectations set for us – such as having an exceptionally good year of sales, unusually high grades, etc. Our achievements in these activities are often only relevant while we’re in that environment. When we leave our school or job, the achievements aren’t portable. After three years of exceptional sales in a previous job, the next year will simply be your first year of exceptional sales in the new job… not your fourth. Your previous performance might have gotten you the new job, but it’s unlikely to be considered as part of your new performance history.

But what if these types of achievements were portable? What if when you left a job to go to another job, or back to university, you could continue to build on your previous achievements and you were evaluated based on your performance relative to your cumulative performance history?

Achievements that impacted a life-long system would be worth having, and therefore jobs or educational institutions could use these achievements to encourage new behaviours. Achievements could help break through some of the resistance to change when a new behaviour set is desired but people still perceive the old set as optimal. The new behaviour has a valuable benefit regardless of whether it’s seen as the best way to do things.

There are also interesting implications for using achievements as an enabler for preserving a sense of culture with workers who are employed under flexible arrangements. Someone working from home can participate in events and share their achievements with others in the company. Relevant achievements outside of the formal work engagement, such as community service, can count toward the work performance review even though it didn’t happen on “work time”.

In conclusion, the concept of achievements in games is a new application of an old concept; however the ability to translate achievements from one environment to another is new as it relies heavily on recent advances and standardisation of information systems. The potential applications of this concept outside of the gaming world are exciting and could have profound impacts on the way we live and work. Ultimately, it may lead to new ways of “keeping score” of how well we’re playing game of life.