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It's a slow news day, so it's time for another essay. This time I want to address some of the absolutely shocked reactions I got in public and in private when people found out about the utterly cavalier way I was using my Gold Hammers in Brawl.

See, you get a total of five Gold Hammers in Brawl. If you want to unlock everything, some of the later challenge requests are brutally difficult, or simply require you to do things you'd probably never want to do in the course of just playing through what the game has to offer. People who were really serious about doing all of the unlocks would never, ever use the Gold Hammers the way I have.

Of course, I keep stating "I don't really want to unlock everything, I just want all the stuff that makes Brawls more fun." Characters, stages, Assist Trophies, that's pretty much it. Somehow this doesn't sink in, and I keep getting advice on unlocking things I don't actually want.

At what point did it become an obligation for gamers to complete every optional goal in a game?

I covered the 360 for a good solid couple of years after the system launched, and I saw how the presence of Achievements in every game could really energize the community and get people to stick with games they'd started even after newer stuff was out. I generally thought of it as a positive thing.

For serious skills gamers who can complete games far more quickly than 90% of the other people who'll ever play the game, it ensured they'd get a decent amount of playtime for their purchase. If you just really enjoyed a game, then Achievements could be a great way to encourage you to do silly things you might not otherwise. The SotN Achievements, for instance, and the Earth Defense Force 2017 Achievements struck me as a perfect way to use the system. They enhanced the entire experience of playing either game.

Ah, but the inevitable Achievement whoring started. People started trying to acquire huge amounts of gamer points by using strategies that the guide writer in me can only call degenerate. People started compiling lists of "easy 1000" games, and people stuck with them even if they hated them just to get that extra 1000 points on their gamercard. Achievements stopped being a way to extend a game's fun, and started somehow being the "goal".

Gamerpoints were intended, as far as I understand it, to be an easy way to glance at someone's gamer card and get an idea of how skilled they were and how much time they devoted to playing games. An older gamer might want to stay away from people with high gamerscores in online play, for instance, because that could mean getting matched up with little kids who played eight hours a day. Likewise, high gamerscore players could seek out other high score players who would presumably be of similar skill levels.

Thanks to the degenerate gamerscore-inflating strategies, you can't really do this on Live anymore, if you could ever really do it at all. A high gamerscore means basically nothing, and all a low gamerscore means is either that you have a job or just got your console. Despite the fact that degenerate gamerscore inflation has made gamerscore nearly meaningless, you still have self-professed "Achievement whores" who keep obsessively grinding at games even after they stop enjoying the challenge (or if the Achievement requires no skill at all, just something ridiculous like leaving your system on for 24+ hours).

Likewise, I have lots of friends who once liked Brawl complaining about how boring and awful it is to get all the trophies or all the achievements, but who are still playing as if they might face divine retribution if they didn't. These aren't people playing the game for lack of other things to do, either, some of them are professional or semi-professional games writers like me. I know a few people who come back from long days of playing games for review or preview, or even schoolwork or exhausting jobs, to... grind joylessly at Brawl achievements. Huh?

I guess you could compare this to the way people grind obsessively at MMOs, but there you at least end up with something of tangible value within the context of playing your game: a high-level character who is specialized to do the things you want to do. While there are some tangible game-affecting things you can unlock in Brawl besides what I want, If you've killing yourself for gamerscore or Brawl achievements, you have... events? Demos? A soundtrack everybody else just downloaded? I can't even begin to ascribe value to the imaginary trophies and stickers.

Games are experiences. Whatever meaning they have is created by you, the player, and most games are designed to give you positive, fun experiences (or to let you torture yourself, if that's your thing). If striving for Achievements is fun, that's great, but don't turn games and full completion into bizarre life goals. Games are good for experiencing a vicarious feeling of accomplishment, but few games actually let you really accomplish very much. Most of what you'll do in a game is never going to leave your savefile, and most people are never going to care.

I go into games regarding them as experiences, and generally wanting a particular kind of experience. Brawl I bought strictly for multiplayer partying. So, I'm content to use my Gold Hammers to configure my copy of Brawl for the experience I want, multiplayer with all the basic options, more equickly. If other people want to do differently, that's fine, and if you have a full unlocked Brawl achievement grid, I salute your skills. I hope you enjoyed getting there, because otherwise it's a destination devoid of value.

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