Achievement Systems Explained Luca Galli and Piero Fraternali Abstract In the chapter of Achievement Systems Explained, Galli and Fratenali provide an insight on achievements, their purposes and the way in which they have evolved, and illustrate a taxonomy of possible achievements along with a set of guidelines to be followed when developing them. Finally, Galli and Fratenali introduce a model that can be used to describe all the existing systems in order to try to put the basis for an open platform capable of integrating existing gaming communities. In today’s gaming world, the word ‘Achievements’, even if rooted in the gaming history, has become extremely popular. The spread of broadband connections and the introduction of multi-player interactions as core components of a videogame have brought to life a number of social platforms like Xbox Live!, Playstation Network, Steam and Kongregate, in which the players can track their progress along different game titles and compete among each others. Unfortunately, even if such platforms share similar features, the way in which they manage the aspects of user profiling and statistic tracking is different, leaving the architectural and development aspects of an achievement system tied to the implementation of each vendor. This chapter provides an insight on achievements, their purposes and the way in which they have evolved. A taxonomy of possible achievements is shown along with a set of guidelines to be followed when developing them. Finally, a model that can be used to describe all the existing systems is introduced in order to try to put the basis for an open platform capable of integrating existing gaming communities. L. Galli (&) P. Fraternali Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy e-mail: [email protected] Y. Baek et al. (eds.), Trends and Applications of Serious Gaming and Social Media, Gaming Media and Social Effects, DOI: 10.1007/978-981-4560-26-9_3, ȑ Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014 25
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Achievement Systems Explained
Luca Galli and Piero Fraternali
Abstract In the chapter of Achievement Systems Explained, Galli and Fratenaliprovide an insight on achievements, their purposes and the way in which they haveevolved, and illustrate a taxonomy of possible achievements along with a set ofguidelines to be followed when developing them. Finally, Galli and Fratenaliintroduce a model that can be used to describe all the existing systems in order totry to put the basis for an open platform capable of integrating existing gamingcommunities.
In today’s gaming world, the word ‘Achievements’, even if rooted in the gaminghistory, has become extremely popular. The spread of broadband connections andthe introduction of multi-player interactions as core components of a videogamehave brought to life a number of social platforms like Xbox Live!, PlaystationNetwork, Steam and Kongregate, in which the players can track their progressalong different game titles and compete among each others. Unfortunately, even ifsuch platforms share similar features, the way in which they manage the aspects ofuser profiling and statistic tracking is different, leaving the architectural anddevelopment aspects of an achievement system tied to the implementation of eachvendor. This chapter provides an insight on achievements, their purposes and theway in which they have evolved. A taxonomy of possible achievements is shownalong with a set of guidelines to be followed when developing them. Finally, amodel that can be used to describe all the existing systems is introduced in order totry to put the basis for an open platform capable of integrating existing gamingcommunities.
L. Galli (&) � P. FraternaliDipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italye-mail: [email protected]
Y. Baek et al. (eds.), Trends and Applications of Serious Gaming and Social Media,Gaming Media and Social Effects, DOI: 10.1007/978-981-4560-26-9_3,� Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2014
25
1 Introduction
Achievement is a word that has become mainstream in the gaming field in recentyears. The term refers to a task that the player has to complete in order to obtainrecognition for his effort and thus ‘unlock the achievement’.
This notion is encountered in several heterogeneous systems under differentsynonyms, like achievements, badges, trophies, challenges and rewards.
The growing popularity of the achievement concept is witnessed by the fact thatit is difficult nowadays to find a game that has not some kind of reward ormotivation mechanism; even in gamification (Deterding et al. 2011), that is the useof game design techniques and game mechanics to enhance non-game contexts,achievements cover a fundamental role and are employed as a way to retaincustomers or improve learning (Evans et al. 2011).
Despite the growing popularity in practical gaming, the literature on gamedesign has paid little attention to achievements, even if there is a general consensusthat their proper design is core when driving gamers through their digital gameexperiences.
The goal of this chapter is to provide some insight about achievement systems,along with design guidelines and architectural patterns that may ease the gamedevelopment work.
2 Definitions
In this section, we introduce the terminology that will be used throughout thechapter.
A Player is the user of an entertainment system, may it be a game, a socialcommunity, or other similar platforms.
An Achievement is a set of tasks, defined by a designer, for the player to fulfillso to achieve a milestone and track the progress in a system.
A Badge is an artifact associated to the completion of an achievement and givento a player after its completion, or, in gaming terms, after ‘unlocking theachievement’.
A Leaderboard is an ordered list of players based on the scores they haveobtained in a specific game.
The Player score is a numerical value that represents a measure of the skill of aplayer. When a player obtains a badge, he is often rewarded with an amount ofpoints that depend on the difficulty of the task performed; the player score keepstrack of all the points a player has received or redeemed for prizes in his gaminghistory.
An Achievement System, also called Reward System, is a component of anentertainment platform used to offer, present, manage and share achievements, at aglobal scale and across multiple games or entertainment systems. It offers the
26 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
developers a set of functionalities and APIs to define gaming tasks that can beconverted into achievements for their games; it also offers players a custom sta-tistical information panel that summarizes their gaming history, also called playerdossier, which records everything they have accomplished across the games theyhave played. In their work Hamari and Eranti (2011) also define achievements as‘goals in an achievement/reward system (a different subsystem than the coregame), the fulfillment of which is performed through activities and events in othersystems (commonly in the core game)’. This definition emphasizes the separationbetween achievement systems and games, but omits aspects like the purpose of anachievement, the centrality of player’s role and the separation between theachievement definition and the reward associated to its completion.
3 Related Work
The introduction of social gaming platforms has emerged just in the past few yearsand this phenomenon has gained significative importance only after the intro-duction of the proprietary Xbox Live! achievement system; therefore, the literatureon the topic is still rather limited. The special issue of Game Studies coveringGame Reward Systems (The International Journal of Computer Game Research2012) has addressed the topic. In particular Jakobsson (2011) explains the role ofthe Microsoft’s Xbox Live! system, showing how it can be conceptualized as amassively multi-player game by itself. Moore (2011) discusses the importance ofcustomization items in the game Team Fortress 2 as a motivational driving forcefor the players and discusses how customization has been coupled with theSteam’s achievement system. Medler (2011) illustrates how dossier systems pro-mote player’s motivation and contextualize recorded gameplay, allowing playersto analyze or share data about their performance. In Achievement UnlockedCurley (2010), one of the creators of the Xbox’s Gamer Profile, discusses theimplementation of achievements inside the Xbox Live! Platform; the U.S. Patent(Bortnik et al. 2004) describes the foundations at the base of the Xbox Live!platform. Hamari et al. (2011) have studied a variety of popular achievementsystems in order to identify the typical components of an achievement. In Montolaet al. (2009) used a custom achievement system in order to enhance user experi-ence in a photo sharing service.
4 Achievements in Gaming History
After the increased interest derived from the introduction of an achievementsystem on the Xbox 360, the concept has been transferred to several other socialgaming platforms such as Steam, Playstation Network, Kongregate, Battle.net andeven Facebook.
Achievement Systems Explained 27
Figure 1 shows a timeline of the evolution of achievements.Badges are nowadays associated by younger people with online gaming but
they also have a long history in other fields. In ancient Rome, military heroes wererewarded with medals adorned with the face of Caesar while in recent years BoyScouts are rewarded with merit badges to show the proficiency acquired in specificskill-sets.
Leaderboards, the ancestors of the modern achievement systems, are older thanvideo games themselves. Their creation dates back to the original pinball games ofthe 1950s, when the makers of pinball games realized that adding a high-score listincreased competition, which translated to more time played and more moneyearned.
During the 1970s, when video games began to emerge, leaderboards werequickly adopted into these new games. In 1978 the concept of High Score, as it isknown today, which refers to the highest point value reached in the game andstored in the system, made its appearance in Space Invaders; the term was firstintroduced by Midway’s SeaWolf (Wikipedia 2007); reaching the high scorerewarded the player just with extra time, because at that time it was not possible tosave the top score.
Most of the games released during the 1970s had time limits or simply went onendlessly waiting for the player to run out of resources such as lives, withoutallowing the players to be identified. This option was introduced later on by gamessuch as Space Invaders II and StarFire and became a huge incentive to keepplaying.
1953: First Score
tracking in a pinball
1978:“High Score”
term introduced
1977:Activision’s
Fabric Patches
1990:“E-Motion”
game introduces Achievements
Achievements
2005: Xbox360 launch with improved
Xbox Live!
2007: Valve’s Steam Achievements are introduced
July 2008:Sony introduces
Trophies into PSN
October 2008:Blizzard introduces
Achievements in their best selling game World of Warcraft
2010: Apple unveils its
social gaming network: Game
Center
Fig. 1 A timeline of the evolution of achievements in gaming history
28 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
The achievements concept however, has close antecedents in the history ofvideogames. The Atari 2600 system had already a rewarding system similar to themodern ones in 1977, with physical prizes for the players of the system.
According to Atari Age (1998), Activision offered fabric patches to the playersthat were able to achieve high scores on their games. The manual of these gameslisted some challenges, such as ending a level in less than 33.3 s; the players wereinstructed to photograph their TV screen as a proof of having completed thechallenge and mail the picture to the company, which would send back a cus-tomized patch for that game. Today, these patches have become highly valuedcollectable items and demonstrate an early example of a game reward in the formof a (physical) ‘patch’, an item expressly conceived to be worn and shown toothers, a principle that has been applied also to the distribution of digital patchesand is at the base of modern achievement systems.
Before the diffusion of the Web and of online gaming, accomplishments couldonly be shown locally on the player’s console, because the Internet and theexisting gaming infrastructure were not able to show results to players on a globalscale. Nonetheless, the concept of showing what had been achieved was animportant part of the (local) rewarding system.
The Amiga game E-Motion (Leamon Amigra 2004) from 1990 was one of theearliest games that incorporated some form of achievements, called a ‘secretbonus’. The game had five secret achievements, for example completing a levelwithout rotating to the right or completely failing certain levels.
The transformation of achievement systems into globally distributed systemshas to be attributed to the work made by Microsoft. The first initiative in that sensewas the MSN Games website (Wikipedia 2006). It offers both free and paid singleplayer and multi-player games and has a number of community enhancing featuresincluding badges that players can acquire in some of the games.
In 2005, Microsoft launched their new gaming console Xbox 360 with animproved version of their online service called Xbox Live!. It seems that theachievement system initially was not considered a major feature of the Xbox 360platform, because the player statistics page was only briefly mentioned after all theother components that made the gamer card. Later on, the reception of achieve-ments system within the gaming community was recognised to have commercialimpact, providing player retention features that were not planned.
Kongregate, an online games hosting website, was released on October 10,2006 and introduced a metagame point system to track general prestige in all thegames, individual challenges and loyalty points for contributing to the site andredeemable in games or with products given by advertising partners.
Valve’s Steam digital delivery platform introduced the Steam achievementsystem with the launch of ‘The Orange Box’ late in 2007. Since then, theachievement system has grown in popularity and Steam now offers a wideselection of games integrated within it.
In July 2008, Sony introduced their achievement system into the Playstation 3gaming console with a system software update under the name of ‘Trophies’.
Achievement Systems Explained 29
In October 2008, Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft game launched itsown achievement system covering every aspect of gameplay, including worldexploration, players versus enemies fights, players versus players fights, profes-sions and character development. Some achievements come with in-game cos-metic rewards such as mounts, tabards, vanity pets and titles.
Game Center, originally announced on the April 8, 2010, is an online multi-player social gaming network released by Apple. It allows users to invite friends toplay a game, start a multi-player game through matchmaking, track theirachievements and compare their high scores on a leaderboard.
5 Achievements Design
Achievements are now so popular in the gaming culture that the reasons for whichthey have been introduced are often overlooked; however, to make a rewardsystem effective, it is necessary to keep in mind the purpose for which it has beendeveloped.
As stated by Björk and Holopainen (2005), ‘Games do not work withoutincentives for the players to perform actions and to strive toward their goals’,while Juul (2010) claims that ‘Players play for personal goals, are aware of thegoals of other players, and the shared understanding of intentionality makes gameactions socially meaningful’.
Achievements range from simple actions that the player would do anyway, ascommon gameplay actions, to more difficult challenges even against other players,to a recognition for sharing contents among a community.
An achievement is usually defined by four components:
• Title: The title is a unique identifier used to suggest a theme or hint the playerabout the action he is expected to perform.
• Icon: The icon is a visual representation of the badge that can be obtained aftercompleting an achievement. An icon is usually an evocative, self-descriptiveimage that can hint the player on the actions to be performed or be sufficientlyattractive to create interest among the other players of a community.The icons for an achievement can appear just after the completion of it or theycan come in two different versions: a grayed out version is used when the playerhas not completed the achievement yet, a coloured version is used when theplayer has obtained the corresponding badge.
• Description: The description is used to describe the conditions that must hold inorder for the player to complete an achievement or it may just provide hintsabout a possible action that can be performed in the game. It may also be used toprovide information regarding possible rewards upon the completion of theachievement.
• Points: The achievement’s difficulty may be measured through points assignedto the player upon the completion of the related achievement. Accumulated
30 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
points can then be used as a measure of the effort or the ability of a specificplayer by displaying them in his or her player dossier. Not all the achievementsystem make use of points.
Figure 2 shows an example of these components for an achievement of the game‘Gears of War 2’ (Microsoft Game Studios 2008) in the Xbox Live! Achievementsystem.
Every achievement must also have one or more completion criteria, that can bedefined through event-condition-action (ECA) rules (Ceri and Fraternali 1997).
The event may be a player action, a system event, the occurrence of a specificcondition of the gamestate or a combination of the three that may trigger theachievement completion.
The condition is the set of pre-requirements on the present state or on pastactions that must hold in order for the completion of the achievement to beattributable.
The action is the unlocking of the achievement, which entails the generation ofa badge for the user who has completed the achievement and the assignment ofdigital or real-world rewards. The acquired badges implicitly store valuable userinformation that can be used for profiling purposes, such as his favourite gamesand genres, his mastered skills and past gaming history.
Achievements allow others to recognise what the player has attained andenhance games by providing lasting rewards. This leads to a sense of affirmationgiven by the fictional status that the player has created for himself and theexpectation that others will look with admiration someone who has undertaken theaction stated in the achievement.
The gamer score is a synthetic mean for quantifying a player’s skill. While theobtained badges can represent the specific game mechanics that a player has beenable to master, the numerical score is an immediate and recognisable indication ofthe gamer’s experience. The last component needed to a fully operationalachievement system is a statistical information dossier about the player. In recentyears, games are rarely played in isolation, as players often discuss online theirmastery of the game, including any goals they have completed. A detailed dossierof the gaming history of a player, including the game he has played, the badges he
Achievement’s Icon Achievement’s Title
Achievement’s Description
Achievement’s Points
Fig. 2 Achievement for the game: gears of war 2 with highlighted components
Achievement Systems Explained 31
has obtained, the level he has achieved and his score along with a friendlist and thesocial gaming groups he is subscribed to is therefore crucial, because it is thefeature that enables the social value of the game rewards.
The design of achievements in a game is an aspect often overlooked by gamedesigners but is one of the key factor that is needed to motivate a player. In thefollowing, a taxonomy of rewards will be provided along with meaningfulguidelines to be followed when designing achievements able to provide satisfyingand not alienating experiences.
5.1 Achievements Taxonomy
In order to develop a meaningful categorisation, several existing platforms andgaming communities such as Xbox Live!, Playstation Network, Steam, Kongre-gate and the Facebook’s Achievement System have been taken in considerationwith respect to their achievement system features. In particular, the analysis hasbeen carried on six popular games representative of each platform, listed inTable 1 along with an example for each achievement category; even consideringthe heterogeneity of platforms and genres, the patterns found across the analysedtitles were almost identical. In addition to this research, the opinions and prefer-ences of players has been gathered from several online website centered on thetopic, such as Xbox360Achievements (2006) and PS3Trohpies (2006).
The research has been backed up also with comparisons with the existingliterature in-game design, in particular Salen and Zimmerman (2004), Fullertonet al. (2008), Juul (2005) to assure coherence with existing terminology and togroup achievements following established game mechanics paradigms.
The rest of this Section reports the proposed taxonomy resulting from thedescribed research.
• Instructors show to the players the core mechanics of the game and help them toimprove their skills. The tasks that this kind of achievements encompass aretypically related to actions that need to be mastered in order to proceed with thegaming experience. The benefits that are obtained with Instructors are of twotypes: the players are able to recognize how they can interact with the system byhaving a clear stated goal to be accomplished; the players also feel engaged andmotivated by the immediate reward provided by the achievement once they havecompleted the associated tasks, possibly by just trying to explore and discoverthe game mechanics on their own. In this way they recognize that their actionsin the game are something that was expected from them and, as a result, this willimprove their engagement and perceived feeling of being able to master the
32 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
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Achievement Systems Explained 33
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34 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
game. As an example consider the game Viva Piñata (Microsoft Game Studios2006), a life simulation game in which the player is asked to turn a neglectedplot of land into a beautiful garden full of strange animals. One of the coremechanics of the game is to grow plants to attract new visitors, for this reasongrowing five plants to maturity is awarded with the related InstructorAchievement.
Example of Instructor Achievement for Viva Piñata
• Quests are awarded for completing significative tasks or when reaching amilestone in the game, such as an important event or the end of a level. Questsprovide immediate and continuous rewards to the players because they can bedesigned for any action in order to maintain the level of engagement highthrough the whole game. Typically, a Quest is rewarded only the first time thatthe required conditions are met; if the player performs the same actions again hewill not get any recognition. On the other hand, an excessive number of Questsmay produce the opposite effect, rendering dull or boring the actions undertakenby the players if they are always rewarded in the same way; thus good balan-cement and a variety of achievements are required.
As an example, consider the game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (BethesdaSoftworks 2011), an action role playing open world video game in which theplayer explore a fantasy world to find and defeat a Dragon. During the game, thecharacter controlled by the player may get arrested and put into jail. If the playermanages to evade, he is awarded with the related Quest Achievement.
Achievement Systems Explained 35
Example of Quest Achievement for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Content Discovery are incentives to try all that the game has to offer. They usuallyrequire the players to play in a specific game mode, to try specific gaming featuresor components of the game. This kind of achievements may be used to keep tracknot only of in-game actions but also of the interactions between the player and theuser interface or other special features that have to be emphasised.
As an example, consider the game The Simpsons Game (Electronic Arts 2007), anaction/platformer video game based on the animated television series The Simpsons.The game is most known for having the easiest achievement ever designed, whichrequires just to press the start button in the main menu to award the player with anachievement of this category.
Example of Content Discovery Achievement for The Simpsons Game
36 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
• Socializers reward the interaction among players and their contributions toenhance the experience offered by a platform or a game. Examples includeachievements for making custom content, for reaching the maximum number ofplayers in a game or on a server, for giving items to another player and forassisting another player through a level. They are typical of multi-player sce-narios or in games in which a strong and committed community has beencreated; the interaction loops enforced by Socializers encourage emergentbehaviors that improve the game longevity and are typically used for open worldgames in which players may have to set their own goals. Socializers can alsopromote viral play, especially at the debut of a new title.
As an example, consider the game NBA Live 07 (Electronic Sports 2006), a sportsgames on basketball. The developers chose to exploit the motivational factors ofthe Xbox Live! achievement system to encourage people to play online. Anachievement is given to any player that finds himself playing online while anumber of other players are connected at the same time.
Example of Socializer Achievement for NBA Live 07
• Secret Chests are awarded for finding hidden items, special areas, completingcollections and other similar features. They encourage the player to exploreevery facet of the game and they are usually related to actions that are notmeaningful for the goals of the game but can create surprise or excitement,leading to discussions with other players on how to reach a secret area or on howto obtain a special item.
As an example, consider the game Halo 3 (Microsoft Game Studios 2007), a firstperson shooter video game. During the exploration of the game world, the playermay find special skulls hidden in places difficult to reach. Finding one of theseskulls awards the player with a special achievement, some gameplay improve-ments and special armor sets.
Achievement Systems Explained 37
Example of Secret Chest Achievement for Halo 3
• Grinders are a type of achievement in which the task is to perform the sameaction repeatedly, with little or no variance between each repetition, such asreaching ‘1000 kills’ or earning ‘100,000 gold’. In theory, they are used toencourage deep exploration into modes or certain game mechanics but inpractice they are often abused. Achievements belonging to this category are easyto be designed but they can disrupt the game experience for some players. Theactions required to fulfill the achievement’s condition can be considered welldesigned only if they overlap with something that the player would naturally doanyway during the gameplay.If completing a specific task in the game would beconsidered as a normal behavior even without an achievement attached to it,then an achievement can be designed around it, otherwise this means that theachievement is forcing a player to change his behavior, possibly leading to a lessentertaining experience for him.
As an example, consider the game Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega 2007), a classicalplatform game. During the exploration of the levels in the game, the player maycollect golden rings that are used to show the right path to follow and to protect theplayer from the first wound they may suffer. Collecting 100 rings without beinghurt by any enemy reward the player with an extra ‘life’ and awards the relatedGrinder achievement.
38 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
Example of Grinder Achievement for Sonic the Hedgehog
• Herculean Tasks are rewarded when a player is able to perform exceptionalactions within the game. This category of achievements may include difficult,non-repetitive tasks requiring a good knowledge of the game mechanics, mas-tering of the needed skills or a huge effort in terms of time and concentrationthat only few committed players will be able to mantain.
As an example, consider the game Dead Rising (Capcom 2006), an action-adventure survival horror video game. One of the achievements proposed in thegame requires the player to defend himself from hordes of zombies with limitedfood and weapon supply for 7 game days, which equals to at least 14 real life hoursin a row without the possibility to interrupt the gaming session. This particularachievement is considered as one of the most difficult achievement ever designed.
Example of Herculean Task Achievement for Dead Rising
Achievement Systems Explained 39
• Trophies are unique achievements that can be acquired just by few players inthe world for exceptional actions performed in the game, possibly negating thepossibility for any other player to acquire them. Trophies are associated to tasksor actions in online games that contain strong multi-player components. Thepurpose of trophies is to engage the players in fierce competitions in order to bethe first to obtain the limited reward thus increasing player retention, engage-ment and social interaction. Examples of Trophies may include being the topplayer on a permanent leaderboard or winning an online tournament.
As an example, consider the game Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced War-fighter (Ubisoft 2006), a tactical first person shooter. In the game, players com-mand their team of soldiers while neutralizing hostile forces and completingvarious mission objectives. Featuring strong multi-player components for com-petitive online matches, one of the achievements of the game requires the player tobe on the top of the universal leaderboard, actually recognizing him as the bestplayer in the world. Not every player can reach the top of the leaderboard and sojust a small percentage of all the owners of the game were able to obtain thisachievement.
Example of Trophy Achievement for Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
• Red Marks are assigned to players that performs poorly or commit negativeactions in the game, such as losing or being humiliated. They do not usuallyaward a player with more points because they are extremely easy to be obtainedand players that want to maintain a certain reputation are avoiding them to notbe considered incompetent.
40 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
As an example, consider the game F.E.A.R. 2 (WB Games 2009) a psychologicalhorror first person shooter. The player assumes the role of a special force soldierthat must uncover the secrets of a paranormal menace in the form of a little girl. Asin all first person shooters, during the gameplay the character controlled by theplayer may be killed, even as a consequence of his own mistakes. If the player killshimself in the game five times, he is ‘rewarded’ with a special achievementremarking this fact.
Example of Red Mark Achievement for F.E.A.R. 2
• Loyalties are special achievements that are used to reward the loyalty of the coremembers of a community. They can be given if a player participates to a real-world event like a convention or buys special editions of the game. Consideringthe difficulty to perform such real-world actions, these achievements areextremely valuable and are taken into great consideration by the members of anonline community.
As an example, consider the game Diablo 3 (Blizzard Entertainment 2012), anaction role playing video game. The fastest selling PC game to date, the gamefeatures two different edition, a standard edition and a limited numbered collec-tor’s edition. Players who bought the collector’s edition of the game were providedwith physical and digital objects and were rewarded in-game with a special uniqueachievement for having registered the numbered copy. Considered the limitedquantity and the demand of such version of the game, only few players has beenable to obtain this particular achievement.
Achievement Systems Explained 41
Example of Loyalty Achievement for Diablo 3
5.2 Achievements Design Guidelines
In the following, we present some guidelines on achievements design based on thebest practices provided by Greg McClanahan, achievement designer at Kongre-gate, in McClanahan (2009) and tailored on the taxonomy of Section V.A alongwith the comments and preferences of users stated in the aforementioned forums;they can be used to avoid designing achievements that are not appealing for theplayers or that are not meaningful for the gaming experience.
• A player is motivated by the need of completing all the achievements that thegame has to offer, thus he will always try to use the most efficient method to earnthem. An achievement has to be designed by evaluating this strategy to avoidcreating a repetitive and alienating task.
• If several achievements have been designed to reward ending the game at dif-ferent difficulty levels, it is good practice to acknowledge the highest difficultyat which something has been accomplished, plus all the implied easierachievements.
• Achievements should always be earnable without compromising the gameprogression; a player should not be forced to restart the entire game from thebeginning just because he has missed an achievement.
• Achievements hints must be findable; players must be able to get know that thegame contains secret features or side quests and be accompanied in theirexploration of the gameplay to get to them.
42 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
• Unlikely, situations that can happen during the gameplay should be rewardedwith a special badge in order for the player to remember the moment. Thesetasks have not to be random or too difficult to be obtained, otherwise committedplayers will just spend hours trying to achieve that particular result.
• It is better to avoid designing achievements that reward getting the highestranking among a too large group of people, reaching a top spot on some lead-erboard or winning a tournament. Only few selected or committed players willbe able to obtain them, while the others will feel like they will not be able tocomplete the game with the risk of abandoning it.
• It is better to avoid designing ‘hidden’ achievements that do not state in a clearway which tasks the player has to perform: achievements are well-stated goalsthat the player has to reach, if the tasks are not given the player will just obtainan achievement by chance.
• Awarding badges upon failures, such as losing a certain number of matches orsuffering a brutal death, has to be avoided. Players are not satisfied when losingor being considered low skilled; remarking this fact in their gaming history mayhave a negative effect.
• Grinders should fit with an action that the player would naturally do anyway. Ifcompleting a specific task in the game would be considered as a normalbehavior even without an achievement attached to it, then an achievement canbe designed around it. Otherwise the achievement forces a player to change hisbehavior, which goes against the principle that an achievement should con-tribute to a better experience for the player.
6 Open Achievement Framework
In this section, we propose a platform-independent architectural model for thedevelopment of an achievement system. We started by reviewing several existingplatforms and gaming communities, such as Xbox Live!, Playstation Network,Steam, Kongregate, the Facebook’s Achievement System and then by abstractingtheir features into a conceptual representation that could serve as a reference toreconcile the differences among heterogeneous implementations, e.g. for thepurpose of player data portability across different games, and as a blueprint forfuture interoperable achievement system designs. The model of the achievementsystem is a component of the more general architecture model for games; as areference, we have adopted the game architecture model illustrated in Fig. 3,which is a simplified version of the model introduced in Gregory et al. (2009).
The Gameplay Foundations sub-system includes components of the gameengine used to implement the game mechanics and logic of a game. The Front Endrepresents the interface for the players. The architecture is completed with Game-Specific Subsystems, which embody functionalities that depend on the specificgame, and with the Online Multi-player Management sub-system, which, ifpresent, controls the synchronization of multi-player games. The player interacts
Achievement Systems Explained 43
with the Game-Specific subsystem, thus modifying the internal status of the game;he can also interact with the Front End by navigating menus and requestinginformation regarding his gaming history.
In this model, the Achievement System is a cross-cutting module connected withall the other main sub-systems. Its goal is to receive Gameplay Events from arunning game played by a specific user, process them and return as output theupdated gaming history data for that player, including the badges he may haveacquired and an updated profile.
Gameplay Events represent the occurrence of meaningful game states, forinstance reaching a specified number of collected objects during a gameplaysession.
Once the requirements for the completion of an achievement are reached, theachievement system signals the change to the Game-Specific Flow System and tothe High Level Game.
Flow System of the engine if there are consequences within the gameplay suchas rewarding a player with an in-game item.
The signal is also sent to the Front End, to inform the user about the reward hehas obtained and about his new gaming history report and to the Online Multi-player Management components, if present, in order to enhance the interaction bypairing players with same skills together, encouraging contacts from people withthe same tastes and other social features.
The Achievement System is structured into the components and data flowsshown in Fig. 4: the Action Detection module filters raw events and returns onlythe meaningful achievement actions. The Action Detection performs the filteringand composition of the events through the use of Achievement Action Patterns, i.e.expressions defined by the game developer denoting the sequence of events thattrigger the notification of an action meaningful for the unlocking of the achieve-ment. Achievement actions patterns can be simple predicates selecting events of a
Fig. 3 Gaming architecture with achievement system component
44 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
specific type, e.g. ‘Level Completion’, or more complex expressions, that detect anaction based on a sequence of gameplay events, such as ‘Find the key, open thechest and return the crown to the King’. Achievement actions are processed by aGameStat Updater Module, which tracks and persists the monitored actions asGameplay Statistics. Achievement actions and player statistics are the input to theAchievement Detector, which checks if the required conditions for a particularachievement, defined through Achievement Descriptors, are met, assigns theassociated badge to the player and outputs the updated profile data regarding him.
The Achievement Detector can be implemented by exploiting the event-drivenarchitecture of an Active Database (Ceri and Fraternali 1997). The AchievementDescriptors represent the Event-Condition-Action rules of the active databaseunder the form of triggers used to define the requirements of an achievement. Theevent part specifies which achievement action triggers the invocation of the rule,the condition part specifies the logical predicate that defines the pre-condition forgranting the achievement and the action part represents the generation of the badgeassociated to the achievement and the update of the player statistics.
Figure 5 illustrates a possible schema of the database supporting game datapersistence.
Game is the core entity: the Mode attribute represents the gameplay modes(Single Player, Multi-Player, Cooperative), while the Genre attribute identifies itsgenre (e.g., Puzzle, Educational). An Achievement has an Icon, which describes itin a visual way, a Category that specifies the task (Instructor, Grinder), an attributePointsGiven, which contains the amount of points to be granted and a Booleanattribute OfTheDay defining whether the achievement has to be completed on aspecific day in order to obtain virtual goods, more points or increased levels.ThePlayer entity accommodates game-specific personal and social features. Avatarand Nickname allow the user to be recognizable by using a custom image or a
Fig. 4 Architectural model for an achievement system
Achievement Systems Explained 45
unique fictional name, while Motto, Biography and GamingRig conveycustomization.
To enable social interactions, attributes like Friends and Fans keep track of theplayers the user likes to play with and the players that appreciate the user’sperformance, while the Status attribute denotes if the player is online, offline,occupied or the game he is playing.
Reputation in online gaming communities is fundamental and distinctive fea-ture of any player; being able to recognize wheter a player is bad mannered, proneto cheating, unpleasant to play with is of utterly importance to assure a satisfyinggaming experience for the user of an entertainment platform; it is usually mea-sured as an integer number ranging from 0 to 5. ScreenShot and Videos showsalient moments worth sharing with the community. A player can also choose hisFavouriteGame.
The model describes also the game-relevant statistics: the Level represents theproficiency and the experience of a player, by aggregating in a compact way suchindicators as points gathered, hours spent playing or particularly difficult taskscompleted.
The Points attribute stores all the points that have been achieved in all thegames. ObtainedBadges represent the achievements that have been unlocked.
PlayerTitle is a special recognition given to the player for his actions, like achivalry role, while the PlayerType (e.g. Achievers, Explorers, etc.) associates the
Fig. 5 UML class diagram for an achievement system
46 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
player with a particular behavioral category among the ones detailed by RichardBartler in his article about player types in Bartle et al. (1996). A GameBadgerelates a Player with the Achievement he has obtained.
The CompletionPercentage field shows how much the player has alreadyachieved in a specific task. StartDate and EndDate record the dates in which theplayer has started to work on the achievement’s goals and the date in which he hasobtained it. The TrialsN attribute tracks how many times the user tried to fulfill theachievement. The GameStats relationship denotes the meaningful statistics that thedeveloper has designed for a game, for example the HoursPlayed by a Player orthe Score he has obtained.
Finally, a GamePlayAction, associated with a specific Gameplay of a player,records the StartDate and EndDate of the gaming session and the actual actionsperformed by the player on that specific time frame and the Role defines which arethe allowed actions in the game for the role associated to a player.
7 Achievements as Part of Cubrik’s Gaming Framework
The architecture and models that have been described, along with the guidelinesrelated to the design of achievements, are at the core of a Gaming Framework usedto leverage entertainment capabilities to increase player retention and participationin a novel human computation platform under the name of CUbRIK (The CUbRIKProject 2011).
The aim of the CUbRIK project is to develop a modular framework and dis-tributed system architecture for flexible design and implementation of multimediasearch applications allowing easy reuse of existing components and multimediaprocessing workflow, their extension with domain-specific elements and theincorporation of human computation for tasks requiring human intelligence in thesolution process.
Traditional multimedia search engines are still not able to leverage the fullpotential of the entertainment capabilities offered by the technological advance-ment to drive the increased amount of users that are willing to work to improve theresults of their search.
With the increased need of human contribution to tailor and improve searchresults and provided media content, new paradigms able to encourage and rewardthe improvements brought by the users are needed.
The CUbRIK project aims at exploiting Games with A Purpose (GWAPs),digital games where players generate useful data as a by-product of play. GWAPsare usually applied to tasks where the problem to solve is out of the reach oftraditional machine learning algorithms, such as common sense elicitation andcontent tagging for multimedia search, thanks to the fact that humans havesuperior capacity for understanding complex content. In this way, it is possible toselectively replace or correct the output of automatic content processing systemswith human-produced knowledge.
Achievement Systems Explained 47
One major issue of this kind of applications derives from the fact that the gamesare designed and tailored over the specific task that has to be solved on ad-hocbasis.
This can lead to an experience that may still perceived by the users as work andnot as entertaining as other interactive media applications that follows establishedgame design patterns and incentives for the players. For these reasons, it is nec-essary to investigate the design of game mechanics and motivation techniques ingames in order to solve human computation tasks and define a methodology for theassignment of human computation tasks to the right players based on their profileinformation and past history. These problems are addressed in CUbRIK with theuse of a Gaming Framework that provides a set of tools and guidelines that canease the development of novel engaging applications able to exploit humancontributors.
In particular, an achievement system is under development as a component ofthe Reward System of the Gaming Framework. The Reward System is designed toincrease the participation and engagement of CUbRIK’s users with the use ofincentive mechanisms already well established for games and gamified applica-tions. The Reward system, besides its motivational features, allows also to gatherthe expertise of players in a formalized and persistent way and render it explicitlyavailable for assigning tasks to the most suited users.
8 Conclusions
In this chapter, we have discussed the notion of achievement in games, from both adesign and an architectural perspective. Achievements are becoming a vitalcomponent of modern distributed games, which calls for efforts in standardizingthe data model and the architecture for their support, so to enable interoperabilityof achievements across multiple gaming platforms. The illustrated architecture andmodel are at the base of the CuBRIK Project (The CUbRIK Project 2011), whichis building a human computation platform for addressing content enrichment andmultimedia processing tasks with crowdsourcing. The focus of work is on mixingheterogeneous approaches for the engagement of the crowd: Games With a Pur-pose, question & answering on social networks and specialized crowdsourcingmarkets, like Amazon Mechanical Turk. Presently, the data model and achieve-ment systems are under implementation to support a draw and guess game sce-nario, where players are segmenting images that specialized feature recognitionalgorithms were not able to process. Furthermore, the achievement system datamodel and architecture are being applied to an enterprise scenario, in which an ITcompany wishes to introduce gamification in the development activities of itsdeveloper community. Both the aforementioned efforts will take advantage of aplatform-independent architecture and data model, in terms of reusability of thesystem modules and of the interoperability with novel achievement system stan-dards that may emerge in the future.
48 L. Galli and P. Fraternali
Acknowledgments This work is partially sponsored by the BPM4People project (www.bpm4people.org), funded by the research for SMEs Program of the Research Executive Agencyof the EC. This work is also supported by the CUbRIK Project, partially funded by the EC 7thFramework ICT Programme for Research and Technological Development, under Grant agree-ment no 287704.
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