My name is Angus, and I’m an Achievement Whore

1. Achievement Points
2. ???
3. Profits!!! 

Apparently the EEDAR has figured out that acheivements points are good.  This has been apparent to basically anyone who owns a 360 since the dawn of time, but it’s nice to see in an official looking report.  The report says that Metacritic scores go way up on titles which have a large number of achievement points, as well as a larger variety.  Games which have online achievement points generate 50% more income than those who do not.  Furthermore, a user will prefer to buy a title on platform which as acheivement points (I know I do, if it’s on the 360, I get it on the 360).  A more interesting finding is that if you have achievement points which include a viral marketing component, or some type of content creation, profit is on average 50% higher.

An acheivement is a very powerful reward scheme, because unlike gameplay mechanisms, you can only unlock it once, and that’s it, forever.  Each point is also unique, they are not generic rewards such as extra lives.  What this means is you remember rewards you get, especially if the mechanism in which you got it was particularly offbeat and unique (e.g. hitting the guard with the can he tells you to pick up in Half-Life 2, or taking a picture of Spencer Cohen’s body in Bioshock).  Furthermore the points themselves extent their reach in the other direction as well, by demonstrating your glorious victories to your friends through Xbox live (which cleverly has badges which sync to the system available for facebook and blogs).

Update: A clever assertion by Raph Koster:

Well, yeah. I’m one of the people who went out there and said, “Single-player gaming is doomed,” and I actually used that phrase. An Xbox Live Achievement is a soul-bound item, and Gamerpoints are experience points, and BioShock is a one-man instance dungeon in the Xbox Live MMO. That is the direction that single-player gaming is going, frankly.

Having a larger variety of interactive tasks therefore incentivizes your players to keep exploriIng the world you’ve crafted.  Strategic use of an achievement can introduce a player to an entirely new area of exploration that they may not have considered.  A player will start by picking the low hanging fruit when they try your game, and indeed it’s good to have some early hand-outs, but the fruit is sweet, and as long as you don’t make it impossible to get more of them (I’m looking at you Burnout), they will keep coming back for more.  Eventually they turn into freakish, bizarre creatures like myself, who will stay up to all hours of the morning, killing peasants over and over again because I need more Minions to squeeze 10 more little fetid GP out of your game with my clammy, blistered hands, cackling to the moonlight as I go.  By the way, as a general rule, do not make achievement points which require hours of repetitive action, it isn’t fun, and actually detracts from an otherwise highly entertaining game.

What this means is that the rewards structure of achievement points, while in a sense existing ‘outside the magic circle’, in effect has impact on the game itself, and should therefore be considered as part of the design, not merely an afterthought (as it seems to be in many titles).  So to all you developers out there, do a good job, hire Tim Schaefer to plan your Achievement strategy if you must, but give it serious consideration.  If anyone needs me, I’ll be trying to nail the rest of the gold medals on Portal.

Metaplace

So yesterday there was a brief announcement by a certain Raph Koster.  If you’re not familiar with the name, Raph has acted as Sony Online Entertainment’s Chief Creative Officer for the past few years working on titles such as Star Wars: Galaxies and Everquest II.  Before that he was the lead designer for the highly successful Ultima Online at Origin Systems.  Raph left SOE last year to found a company called Areae, and has been tight lipped about what exactly he was doing there, at least until yesterday when the cat ran screaming out of the bag.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

The platform should allow you to set up a world with basic chat and a map to work on in under five minutes.  Although it’s not clear how the content generation will work, the platform seems to be designed to integrated tightly with the web, allowing objects to script content feeds from outside of the game, thus allowing users to shatter the walled garden which is typical in most video games (Missing since January anyone?).  While I find it instinctively unlikely to occur in the near future, Areae claims one could build a game bigger than World of Warcraft on Metaplace.  While clients are currently limited to forms of 2-D graphics such as 2.5D Heightfields, isometric views, top-down 2D, etc., the expectation is that a 3-D client will continue to be developed.  Areae is itself developing an MMO based on the Metaplace platform, but nothing is known about it presently.  Pricing information doesn’t seem to be discussed, the flavour of the language indicates cheap as free is not out of the question.

I see really interesting potential for ARGs developed on this platform.  A game with tie-ins to dynamic content generated from real-life events based on RSS feeds (fully supported) could be very interesting.  I’m extremely curious as to how well this platform will work.  At the end of the day, much of the difficulty in broad-based game design is in the creation of content and assets which require specialized skills.  XNA tries a related problem that Metaplace is attacking, but neither seems to intuitively deal with the issue that asset creation is difficult for normal humans. 

If you’re not convinced, having Cory Doctorow on the advisory board is a sufficient condition for being awesome.