Here, let’s make a new game. I will call it Achievements. In this game you collect achievements. You can even go on side-quests to collect achievements. Boosting is a lvl30 skill that requires a gamerscore of 900 million. One achievement will be the Achievement achievement, where you gather 5,000 achievements. Another could be the Achievement Achievement achievement, where you have 5,000 of the Achievement achievements. A third could be the Achievement Achievement Ach — Okay, you get my point.

Achievements - the bane of today’s gaming. That and DLC, of course. It would be naive to say that people didn’t play games just for the sake of getting a good score (and that they never cheated/abused to get there) in the olden days, but lately it’s grown into an outbreak of mental retardation.

For example - I like Mass Effect 2, but come on, what’s with all the achievement pop-ups? I upgrade a rifle, I get an achievement. I do X headshots, I get an achievement. I walk through X doors, I get an achievement (okay not really but whatever).

What’s the point of achievements for which I don’t even have to bother actually doing anything noteworthy because I’ll get them anyway - just by cruising through the game? Who the hell am I supposed to show them to? Who the hell is supposed to be impressed by them? WHAT IS THE POINT?

I guess it’s just another example of the disease of consolitis vulgaris, because I don’t really remember this being a trend on PC before the age of the Holy Multi-platformity.

I’ve no idea if Destructoid claims any copyright on this image, so I’m just gonna resize and paste it here:

This provocation points to another obstacle for both art and games, as neither has yet been defined to any general consensus. History provides a relatively clear understanding of what art has been, but that does not help to define what it will become in the future. “Even after sixteen years in the games industry I have a hard time articulating the feel of a game,” Harvey Smith, one of the designers on Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock 2, noted in the closing panel discussion.

An interesting article depicting James Bond as the archetype for action game player-characters.

First there are the broad similarities, the nuts-and-bolts stuff. Bond is always a man on a mission, a loose cannon charged with taking down terrorist armies essentially on his own. It’s a situation with which all gamers are instantly familiar, and by which they are surprisingly unfazed, considering how unlikely it is that one person could effectively dismantle an entire enemy organization with little more than a pistol and a passing knowledge of current keycard technology.

WE ARE ALL JAMES BOND. Or are we?

If some of these echoes could be explained away as thematic coincidence or happenstance, there’s a more persuasive philosophical affinity between Bond and videogames. Though he rarely does anything pro-active apart from patronizing bartenders with extremely specific cocktail instructions, the fictional world that Bond occupies immediately warps itself around 007 in various ways: beautiful women flutter their eyelashes, ominous henchmen make a beeline directly for him, and local informants conveniently reveal intelligence and then fade away. Does any of this sound familiar?

This is quite an interesting point of view, although it could be said that James Bond (minus the nice suits) is the general archetype for the late twentieth century action hero, be it a film, TV show or a video-game one.

Some of these moments pop up in the popular press with either outraged or perplexed headlines. Others are simply too involved to be noticed outside the gaming world. Either way, videogames involve us in some very dark moments. But quite the opposite to what those headlines would suggest, these are not dangerous experiences we need to guard ourselves against. They are good for us.

It’s not really that great an article but it’s the best I’ve come across in the last few days (I’ve been busy anyways). The paragraph above and the following two more or less summarize it:

I know these games aren’t perfect. They are often too preoccupied with violence and walk all too familiar territory rather than taking genuine risks. But one thing I wouldn’t change is their willingness to create playful ways to experiment and engage in very dark moments.

Beneath the explosions, dialogue and gunplay they silently ask some disturbing questions about how this makes us feel. Answering that question is a long and personal task, but one worth the risk and effort.

Nothing groundbreaking, eh?