One of the bigger trends in gaming over the past few years has been the rising popularity of in-game achievements. Trophies, unlockable features and gaming scores – they’re everywhere.

Virtually every game you can purchase on Steam has a bunch of Achievements you can unlock, and a large part of the Xbox Live infrastructure is built upon their completion. Gamers compare scores and focus on completely finishing a game up to the 1,000 point mark.

Microsoft ranks their members based on their ability to complete games to their full ability, and fulfilling quotas is an obsession for many players who are completely devoted to finishing every little feature of a game.

But how is this obsession with Achievements and trophies affecting gamers’ interactions with a story? To be sure, offering Achievements is a good incentive for having people finish games. They’re also a great way to get people motivated and interested with the different mechanics of a game, which allows them to become more familiar with controls.

Team Fortress 2is a good example of this, using Achievements for different weapons and teaching gamers ways of using them. TF2 was one of the first games to start using the Steam Achievements platform.

But the biggest problem with the newfound focus on achievements is that they are blending genres that were once diametrically opposed. When all is said and done, the attraction of completing Achievements is purely bragging rights.

Gamers want to be able to say that “I finished this” before their friends can. This is clearly evidenced by the silly and disposable nature of so many of them – for example, the gnome achievement in Half Life 2 that has you take a garden gnome throughout the entire game so you can place it in a rocket and blast it off into space.

Whereas Achievements were once used in RPGs and multiplayer games, single-player games are now filled with them – and they are a complete distraction. The problem with Achievements is that they are rewarding players for simply completing an action like a rat in a cage. They don’t offer anything of depth or substance to characterization.

Every game requires you to fulfill different Achievements and goals to “finish” the game, but many of them aren’t even achievements at all – gamers are being rewarded for doing nothing but watching cut scenes.

This happens in Assassin’s Creed, Dead Space, Force Unleashed and a plethora of other games as well. The obvious connection between all of these games is that they are single player stories – and when examined objectively, the inclusion of Achievements seems quite odd.

So how does this distract a player from the game’s story? The disturbance is subtle, but it has a heavy impact. By creating an atmosphere of Achievements to unlock, the ultimate goal of the game is no longer to explore the story and characters.

Instead, it becomes “I must finish x, y and z to achieve 1,000 points.” The is game no longer a vehicle for a gripping story for the player to experience, it is merely reduced to a grocery list of tasks that any person can do if they have the time.

So all of a sudden, once a gamer is given the task – “collect all 100 treasure boxes!” or whatever – the main storylines becomes a secondary feature that the gamer will finish for the Achievements, rather than for the payoff.

This has a place in certain games if they are secondary and ultimately connected to the plot. For example, in Assassin’s Creed II, Ezio is told to gather feathers for his mother so she can keep them in a jewelry box. It is a secondary objective, but is tied to the main storyline and actually has an emotional purpose.

But taking a gnome all across a game into a rocket? It may provide the gamer with some incentive to complete the game, but they’re doing it for completely the wrong reasons.

So with this in mind, here are a few ways games can make their Achievements better and more relevant to the story:

1. Unlock Achievements after the game is finished. After all, Achievements are secondary. They are merely bragging rights and don’t add anything to the plot (most of the time).

If gamers are to be more interested in story, then perhaps developers should use a system where they only unlock Achievements after the initial playthrough of the game has been completed. It will provide incentives for those people who actually care about Achievements, but keep the integrity of the story intact.

2. Integrate Achievements with the story. Assassin’s Creeddoes this pretty well, with the aforementioned Achievement for feathers being a prime example. But Achievements should always come alongside an objective within the story.

For example, if a character gives you an order to obey, something like “destroy five catapults from the invading army,” the Achievement associated with that should be something like “don’t lose any health while completing this objective.”

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood has planned many of its Achievements this way, and in order to achieve 100% synchronization within the game you need to complete many of those secondary objectives – that’s the way to do it.

3. Create “hidden” Achievements that affect the plot. One of the most underrated games of the year is the FPS Metro 2033, which is set in a post-apocalyptic Russia, where society now lives in subway tunnels and mutated creatures roam the surface.

But the game has a type of points system that actually affects the ending. By doing certain good deeds, like listening to conversations or rejecting rewards for completing an objective, the number of “points” you receive goes up, just like in an RPG – but the player is never aware of this.

And depending on where that points balance is at the end of the game, the ending changes. This isn’t strictly an achievements point-system, considering the gamer never knows it’s happening, but it would be great to see Achievements directly affect the plot like this

4. Dan Pink gives a great Ted Talk on how motivation works and what actually drives people to get things done. In short, he points out that incentives don’t often actually cause people to work harder. He also makes a great point that incentives cause people to narrow their focus and restricts the possibility of their success. It distracts them. 

One of the points he makes is about “mastery,” and that incentives should allow people to become better at their job. This is a great idea that can be made in games. Achievements should actually influence your character and make them more powerful.

This is evident in Mass Effect – if you finish the first game and fulfill a bunch of objectives, you start the next game at a much more powerful place. Pink also makes a great point about autonomy, in that people often work better if they have the time to do so – citing Google’s 20% time policy, adopted by Australian company Atlassian.

It would be interesting to see if that could be extended into games. It would be interesting to see if games could incentivize players by having them go off and make their own goals and other types of objectives, kind of like a new type of sandbox game. Instead of giving players achievements to fulfill, why not have them create their own?

Achievements are much more suited for multiplayer games where the story serves as a backdrop then a motivator for action. But by pushing more Achievements and trophies into single-player stories, developers are distracting from the narrative. Instead of rewarding the player for simply playing the game at all, games need to start rewarding gamers for how they play, and then create ways integrating the reward process with the game’s story.