From psmith, gamer: Why there’s more to life than the XP Factor

: Image via Wikipedia

I’ve started* a games blog – at psmithgamer.tumblr.com – and this is an exerpt from a new post about levelling up in gaming. Stick around here for thoughts on digital media, but go there for thoughts on shooting aliens.

Something very odd has happened to gaming: people no longer try their damnedest to get to the end of a title to find out what happens. These days, with some of the biggest games around, the story is mostly a compared to the pursuit of increasing a player’s score, XP or level.

Gone are the linear afternoons spent testing “completing” games – Atari, C64, Spectrum and Amiga veterans will understand this concept all too well – now it’s more a case of competing in them.

XBox Live’s GamerScore, Steam‘s in-built, in-game achievements and Ubisoft‘s own game achievements system add another layer to games: outside the plot, nothing to do with the characters, they’re just extraneous throw-away trophies to compare with friends.

Some very clever people such as Jesse Schell, technology professor at Carnegie Mellon Institute (via the very good Gamestm magazine), think this is a bad thing for games.

Here are some achievement/XP heavy titles:

– Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare, the biggest consumer entertainment product launch of all time (according to Activision/Vivendi) was nothing to do with its story-based first-person single player mode, but everything to do with its collaborative or solo deathmatch leagues, which are still sapping bandwith in homes and internet cafes across the world.

Read on here…..

*I say “started” it’s actually a tumblr I launched years ago when Tumblr first kicked off, so beware some strange old posts….

How Steam stopped me from pirating games and enjoy the sweet DRM kool-aid (crunchgear.com)
Ubisoft explains why Driver is returning, new car-swap mechanic (gonintendo.com)
The 5 Most Memorable Moments Of E3 2010 (multiplayerblog.mtv.com)
Top Ten PC Games of All Time (brighthub.com)
Half-Life 2 Comes To Mac Tomorrow [Valve] (kotaku.com)

psmith, journalist