I hate achievements

Look, I have mild OCD. When a game pops up a list of achievements, my brain doesn’t see “optional fun challenges.” It sees a checklist. And checklists? Checklists must be completed.

This is a problem.

I’m guided by an invisible hand

Achievements don’t change the game. The bones are the same, the mechanics untouched, the world identical whether you chase that little digital trophy or not. And yet we know everything is different. The mere existence of an achievement list reframes the entire experience. It’s not your adventure anymore - it’s a standardized set of objectives. Worse, it’s a list of objectives somebody else made, for a game I’m supposed to be playing.

Sir, this is my game. Please leave.

I was looking something up as I was playing Frostpunk the other week. Just a quick search, nothing major. And some comment mentioned you get an achievement if you don’t use heaters or steam hubs. So there I was, in a game about surviving frozen apocalypse, refusing to use heaters. Not because it was fun. Not because it was interesting. Because the developer years ago decided this arbitrary constraint deserved a little badge.

Frostpunk: My citizens are freezing, their workspaces are too cold. Yet, I’m refusing to turn up heating.

When I finally caved and placed one - because, you know, my people were dying - I felt sad. Not about the fictional frozen citizens. About missing the achievement. Which is funny, because I didn’t even look at the list of achievements, and didn’t care about achievements until I saw that comment.

Wait, let me look something up…

Yup, I own a copy of Frostpunk on Epic Game Store, which doesn’t even have achievements for the game. It sucks to be a prisoner of your own mind, but such is life as a human being, I guess.

Why don’t you ignore achievements?

I’m doing my best, but that’s how my brain is wired. I know achievements are right there, waiting for me, taunting me, letting me know that I’m not engaging with the game fully.

Here’s a story - I was playing Old School RuneScape.

The beauty of Old School RuneScape is its unparalleled ability to let you make your own fun and choose your own path through the game’s world.

Old School RuneScape is a wonderfully slow and grindy massively singelplayer online roleplaying game, with one of its key features being the complete freedom you have when it comes to activities you perform. There’s no character level (technically there is, but it doesn’t matter much), and you get to choose your own path through this massive game. So massive, than only a few thousand dedicated players have reached the coveted 99 in every one of the game’s skills, and the majority of the players can only dream of maxing out maybe a few of the game’s 24 skills.

All of that freedom means that no two players will have a similar path through the game, and you get to choose how you enjoy the game. Because “beating” the game is somewhat out of the realm of possibility for a casual player like me, this removes a lot of the pressure to optimize, which is nice.

Or it was nice, until I found a very thorough official wiki for the game, which outlines the most optimal path through the games hundreds of quests and skill grinds. The wiki’s so good, that it lets you enter your username and see how you’re progressing along the optimal path, with little checkmarks and everything.

So I spent a month playing the game with a checklist, and I did progress fast - it was indeed an optimal path through the game. But I lost all interest in the game - the wanderlust was gone, the joy of discovery wasn’t there…

OSRS Wiki has me covered with the most optimal, most efficient path through the game. I’d be a fool not to follow it.

One of the meditative things you can do in RuneScape is grind for skills. Just repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again. Don’t ask me why, I know it sounds boring - but it’s a mindless activity and it feels nice - it’s a major part of the game. Well, the optimal path route robbed me of skill grinding, because the most optimal thing to do is to complete a chain of 232 quests in a given order before proceeding to skill grinding.

I stopped playing for a bit, came back - and had a lot more fun playing without the guide. But I now know that I’m not doing the right thing. Why waste 10 hours chopping trees when I could instead complete an obscure quest in an hour?

See, it’s not even the achievements that I have a problem with. It’s any list that tells me what “done” is like, or what’s the right way to play the game.

Spoiler alert

Here’s the thing that really gets me: achievements ruin secrets.

“Find the hidden area.” Oh. So there’s a hidden area. Thanks for that. Now I’m not discovering anything - I’m just hunting for something I already know exists. The magic of stumbling onto something unexpected, gone, replaced by the anxiety of frantically searching for a secret I know is supposed to be somewhere here.

The best moments in games are unscripted. That time you wandered somewhere you weren’t supposed to go. That time you tried something stupid and it worked. That time you made your own goals because they felt right.

Skyrim: That’s a lot of pots and pans. Hope Camilla doesn’t mind all that junk in her our house.

I went through a cast iron phase in real life a while back - obsessed with some heavy cookware. And in Skyrim, I decided I was going to be the Master of Pots and Pans. Collected every pot I found. Carried them all home. Decorated my virtual house with them like some kind of cast iron hoarding dragon.

Now that was an achievement.

That felt awesome. It was mine. My weird little project that no developer anticipated or rewarded. But if a game had told me “Collect 500 pots”? That’s a chore, with no respect for my time. The joy would’ve evaporated because it stopped being my idea and became homework. And I’d feel bad for missing out on portion of the game every time I didn’t collect a piece of cookware.

That’s the problem with achievements - they turn optional weirdness into a standardized list. They take the infinite possibility space of play and collapse it into someone else’s definition of “done.”

The thousand-hour prison

Total War: Warhammer III. Love it, love it so much that it makes many appearances in my writing. But there are achievements for beating the game with every faction on the hardest difficulty. That’s over a thousand hours of playtime. What for? So I begin to hate the game I love?

This is Total Warhammer III faction selection screen. Each faction has 2-7 unique playable lords. That’s a lot of campaigns.

I haven’t done it. I won’t do it. But the thought crosses my mind more than it should. That nagging feeling that I haven’t really finished the game, haven’t given it all, even though I’ve had hundreds of hours of fun with it. The checklist remains incomplete.

There’s a game reviewer I like - Mortismal Gaming - who 100%s games before reviewing them. Every ending, every branch, every secret. And watching his videos is genuinely fascinating, but also kind of alien? We play the same games but have completely different experiences. To do what he does, you need guides, you need plans. You need to know what’s coming. You need to optimize for completion rather than discovery.

I understand the appeal, there’s a puzzle solving element to playing a game to complete all the achievements - and do so in the minimum number of playthroughs, while trying to not go mad, probably.

I can’t do that. The moment I open a guide, the game becomes a paint-by-numbers, and that’s not what I want from games.

Worse, many of the games I truly love come with achievements. Hey, I’m not going to lie that I don’t get a slight dopamine hit from seeing an “achievement unlocked” popup. For the sake of writing this piece, I looked up the list of achievements for the Outer Wilds - one of my most favorite games of all time.

I won’t spoil much, but one thing Outer Wilds is not is a game about roasting marshmallows over a campfire.

Outer Wilds is a mystery (which I won’t spoil at all), it’s a game you can never re-experience again. The resolution of the mystery is a beautiful narrative moment, after which I’m content to shut down the game, content to leave unexplored corners of the world untouched.

Well, according to the achievement list, I should try killing myself within 60 seconds of booting up the game, burn and eat 10 marshmallows, and fly my little spaceship into the sun. Ummm… I’m fine, thanks.

Player retention tricks

You know what else does this? Daily quests in MMOs.

Same energy. Same problem. The game creates a system designed for player retention - to keep you logging in, for a little bit of time every day - but I don’t need to be retained. I want to be entertained, at my own pace.

Dailies warp everything. Suddenly the most efficient use of your time is booting up the game for 15-30 minutes to clear your checklist. That epic adventure? That mountain you wanted to climb just to see what’s up there? That boss lair that looked interesting? Inefficient. The daily is waiting. The daily expires. The daily matters.

Loss aversion is a hell of a drug.

What I actually want

Now let me be reasonable for a moment.

Achievements can be great. It’s a way for community to share their love for the game, and connect over weird and unique ways people get to enjoy the medium. Hey, speedrunning is an achievement, and speedrunning is awesome (to watch).

Here’s the thing: the upside of in-game achievements is supposed to be a sense of, well, achievement. But you get a greater sense of achievement from setting your own goals. From deciding what matters to you and then doing it. The pot collection will always mean more to me than any platinum trophy.

Achievements: always there, always watching, waiting to inform me of something cool I did when I’m least expecting.

I want intrinsic motivation. I want to play because playing is fun, not because a list told me to. I want to explore because I’m curious, not because an achievement revealed that secrets exist. I want to finish games when they feel finished to me, not when an arbitrary percentage hits 100.

Achievements don’t change the game. But they change the way I play them. All I can do is fight my desire to look at the list of achievements and change the way I play. Ignore them. But I’d know, I’d always know they’re there.

Now that I think of it, I’ve got more pots to collect - I think 500 was not enough.

P.S: After writing this piece I can finally spell the word “achievement” from the first try.