Achievements: the best gamer psychology since the Dead or Alive guys* said “What if we gave them all gigantic tits?” Combating the problem of playing games and wondering "Am I achieving anything?" by programming said game to say "You totally are!" That's the best self-solving problem until someone invents slimming pizza
They’ve taken over gaming worlds the way infinite armies of Nazi zombie cyborg terrorists couldn’t, and exert greater control over some players than showering.
Three Kentucky students rendered themselves entirely irrelevant by building a self-Playing-station to gather an impossible million roses on We Love Katamari, and when your greatest achievement is “No longer even has to play games” you become so useless you actually evaporate.
You waft off to join unicorn harnesses and non-alcoholic beer under a stack of Dora the Explorer strategy guides in the Room of Pointlessness.
Games use achievements as tutorials, as badges of level completion, as motivation to try out different things (though if you need a points reward to try out the different weapons in a "shoot the enemies with your weapons" game there’s something wrong with you).
Every gaming writer in the world weighed has weighed in, but not one has got the real idea: they're Awesomeness Multipliers.
They take something that’s already utterly awesome and then agree with you about it. Chainsawed something the size of a bank's head office? Murdered twenty machine-gunners with a knife?
Backflipped off a ramp, headshotting three people before you land in way that would make Ghandi cheer"? You're on your own going “holy shit that was cool!” and DING!
The computer agrees with you! The constant style of the achievements, different to the game you're playing, doesn’t break the immersion. It provides you with independent verification that yes, you just kicked electronic ass and that was cool.
Some say that achievements are pointless (which is rich coming from an army of identical lone heroes taking on a million parallel versions of the same alien horde). They’re not just fun, they save relationships: I once shot an invisible enemy in the head from two miles away and that’s the sort of shit you NEED to share.
My friends weren’t around, none were even online, and my lovely lady had previously made it clear that if I talked about game stuff she would talk about Sex And The City. To this day I credit the DING of the Steam Achievement "Shoot The Breeze" with saving our relationship.
It's an electronic high five when you need it most, and if they'd built R.O.B to do that instead of the stupid shit with the gyros he'd still be around today. He'd be more popular than Mario. Hell, he'd have his own TV show (and if you want to argue I offer "Daisy of Love" as proof.)
Achievemensts multiply how much fun you're having - doing something regular, the DING is a little boost. The more outlandish, impossible and insane the achievements, the better you feel!
Achievement hunters counter that the almost un-chievable impossible goals aren’t fun, to which I reply: they’re still mulitpliers. Good achievements aren’t little check boxes on a list that says “Do all this then you an clock off this game”. They’re records of your victories over the Laws of Physics and Possibility.
I’m having tons of fun and when I get one it boosts that.
If you've turned your own games into work, lists that you have to tick before you can clock off and go to the next one, then the way that achievement takes five hours to unlock is just maginifying that: multiplying something that isn't fun anymore into an actual chore, a parod of how you’ve turned games into unpaid labor that’d make Don Quixote nudge Pancho and say “Look at that time-wasting loser.”
So give the impossible achievements, the never-ever-going-to-happens so I can happen the hell out of them, and know that when Gamerscorers complain you're only annoying those who deserve it.