Overachiever For a Day

26th May, 3pm - MLB 2K6

It seems that when the Xbox 360 first came out, the good people at 2K Sports didn't quite understand the idea of Achievements. I'm guessing there was a development team meeting where the project lead got up in front of the room and said, "Microsoft says we have to put these 'Achievement' things in the game. So that players can get points."

"Points? They can already get points by scoring in the game. That's the whole idea of sports."

"No, no, these are different, outside points. They don't mean anything. They're just... other points."

Silence. A guy in the back coughs.

"Look, I don't get it either, OK? Just shove some goddamn Achievements in there. It doesn't matter. This whole Xbox 360 thing will be a huge flop anyway."

And thus all of the 2K6 games have five Achievements, each one worth hundreds of Gamerpoints. You unlock those points by adjusting the performance sliders on your team all the way up and sliding another team all the way down. This is the most challenging part, as it turns out, thanks to an atrocious interface. (How hard is it to program a slider? Quite hard, it appears.)

Then you play a game and humiliate the other team while trying not to feel dirty about the whole thing. I beat the Florida Marlins by about a million runs and earned 650 points, including 300 for the "Offensive Explosion" Achievement. It was offensive, all right.

• Gamerpoints acquired: 650
• Total: 2060

26th May, 4.40pm - Madden NFL 07

In Madden 07, you can have the computer simulate games, and if the computer players "earn" Achievements, you get the Gamerpoints. I wanted a break, so I set the 2007 edition to work.

Achievements had been on my mind since this year's Game Developers Conference, where developer Chris Hecker gave a talk entitled "Achievements Considered Harmful?" Hecker had looked into the psychological research on reward systems, and he discovered that "dangling carrots" like Xbox 360 Achievements might not motivate players the way we think they do.

According to Hecker, the research shows that when you offer people a reward for completing an "interesting" task - a wonk-ish term for something a person might want to do anyway - their motivation tends to goes down.

For instance, studies showed that when kids were offered free pizza for reading books, they actually ended up reading less, not more. One theory is that when there's a reward, our brains perceive all the pleasure as coming from that big bonus at the end, so whatever we're doing to get there seems less enjoyable as a result.

The flip side of the research is that rewards motivate people pretty well for "dull" tasks - rote stuff like data entry. Hecker's fear is that as developers engineer games with more effective Achievement systems, they're actually building duller games. (FarmVille, anyone?)

"As a game designer who wants the industry to be healthy from an aesthetic standpoint and a financial standpoint, the focus for me is that dull-versus-interesting tasks thing," Hecker told me in an interview shortly before my 24-hour run.

"If it turns out that extrinsically motivating people reduces their interest in working on interesting, challenging things, then that's kind of a bummer." Hecker doesn't know whether the existing psychological research applies to Achievements, Trophies, and the rest, but he thinks some enterprising scientist ought to take a look.

I asked him for his take on the Achievement-whore phenomenon. "If you're playing bad games just to run up your Gamerscore, that's fine; there's nothing 'damaging' about it. But wow, what a boring life."

• Gamerpoints acquired: 180
• Total: 2240

26th May, 5.35pm - Jumper: Griffin's Story

I haven't seen the movie Jumper, but from playing the game I gather it goes something like this: A man named Griffin possesses moderate, erratic powers of teleportation that are extremely difficult to control. His hobby is walking into a nondescript room. Often, a pack of hunched lobotomy patients also lumber into the room, and Griffin bludgeons them with his teleportation. He repeats this process until the world is saved.

Oh, and sometimes he says, "This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me," because he thinks this is funny. His is a lonely existence.

The correlation between bottom-of-the-barrel games and easy-Achievement games made me wonder if it was a marketing ploy, a crass tactic to earn a few more sales for cheap shovelware. I decided the answer was "no" for two reasons. First, the Achievement hunters tend to rent the easy-1000 titles, not buy them.

Second, as I played Jumper, I realised that the Achievements are garbage - I had 300 points in 10 minutes - for the same reason that the game stinks: The people who produced it simply didn't care.

• Gamerpoints acquired: 700
• Total: 2940

26th May, 7.10pm - NBA 2K6

I lingered on Jumper too long, the same way you might linger over a dead animal in the road a second more than a decent person probably should. Because yes, it's gruesome and awful and sad; you know this. Then again, you rarely see anything like it.

I was behind the pace, though, so I finally wrested myself away and turned to NBA 2K6. Same deal as before: my sliders way up and the other team's sliders way down, for the first complete 1000-point game of the evening.

• Gamerpoints acquired: 1000
• Total: 3940