Trigger Finger

One thing that still never ceases to amaze me is the addictive nature of the simple feature called ‘Achievements’ on the Xbox 360.

Let me begin by saying I pretend to not care about gamerscore, that arbitary number attached to my gamercard that indicates nothing more than how many games you have had, and then played enough to achieve a gazillion goals set by the developers of the games. I know it has no relevance to the universe, it doesn’t indicate ability in any way, and has little kudos attached to it even amongst gamers.

Yet I find myself chasing these achievements relentlessly, I have bought Xbox Live Arcade games purely because they had easy sounding achievements, I have fought for hours in RS6 Vegas with a sniper rifle on maps totally unsuited to sniper rivals in order to get that 50 headshot kills achievement, and worst of all (and my moment of realisation!) was last night buying up all the French and Korean cars in Forza 2 for achievements that give 1 damn gamerpoint!! Thats a new level of insanity… I would never buy a korean car in real life, and definitely never a french one. Yet here I was hungrily gobbling up cars not worthy of pissing on if they caught fire with my hard earned in-game money.

Despite the relatively high number of games I have played, despite the endless hours I have spent chasing these imaginary successes, my gamer score stands at a pitiful 11,000 something! Yet I am so attached to it I refused create a new gamertag to ease my payment issues with having a UK account and a swedish credit card, which would be understandable if my gamerscore was great… but it’s not.

There are one-handed, one-eyed, deaf, dumb and mute 8 year old girls with better gamerscores than me after having played less than half the games I have! But then as the next time that little grey rounded rectangle pops up on my Xbox 360 game saying I have achieved 12gs for ‘Shooting someone with red hair whilst the wind was blowing in a south-westerly direction’ proves again and again… achievements are an elixir of gratification that are unexplainable to any normal rational (non-gameplaying) adult.

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