For the past few weeks I’ve been on a personal mission to go through each of the games in my Steam library, one by one, and complete all of the achievements in them. This is known on Steam as a “perfect game.” and is listed in your profile page as such. So far, I’ve got one perfect game, but many others are very close. This award is binary, giving the impression that I’ve only played one game out of my list. This means if I have 99/100 achievements, it will not give me a “perfect game.” I have hundreds of games to play so it’s unlikely I’ll ever actually finish this. Still, it’s something fun to do.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of Achievements, think of Scouts badges: you get badges for completing certain actions in a game up and above the basic gameplay. An example might be completing the entire game without dying or finding all of the hidden gems in a level. They don’t directly affect gameplay but provide an interesting meta-game which encourages players to come back (known as replayability) and also gives a sense of completion when you’ve achieved them all.
There is also a listing, on Steam, which shows, per game, what percentage of players have gotten each achievement. For example, here is the achievement listing for a game called Race The Sun, which is a bit like a racing game where you also have to dodge obstacles.
All this is well and good, but who decides what these achievements will be? The game developers themselves. This is where we get into a sort of gray area where, if the achievements are garbage, they actually serve to disicentivize continuing to play the game. Below, I’ll provide a few examples of these “Anti-chievements.”
1. The “Play for X Number of Hours” Anti-chievement
Hey! You’ve already completed the game but to get this last achievement, you have to rack up some insane amount of hours just to say you did. Let’s say 50 hours? Excellent! This is fun!
2. The “Do a Mundane, Repetitive Task X Times” Anti-chievement
There is a game in my Steam library that gives you an achievement once you click your mouse 500,000 times. Let that sink in for a minute.
3. The “Order of Magnitude Score” Anti-chievement
This one sometimes appears alongside #2 but instead of jumping right to 500,000 clicks, you get achievements at 1000, 10000, 100000, then 500000 clicks. Count ’em: that’s FOUR achievements you get. Just for clicking! Aren’t you happy?
4. The “Play it all again” Anti-chievement
Wizorb is the most notable for this transgression. Part of the game has you rebuild a village over time using the coins you collect during game play. But, after you’ve beaten a large portion of the game, you may realize that there is an achievement for beating the game without rebuilding the town. If you didn’t notice this before you started playing, you would have gotten hours and hours into it, only to have to restart and replay the game again without doing this one thing at the very beginning.
5. The “Rely Completely On Luck” Anti-chievement
Faerie Solitaire was a fantastic game. The achievements were pretty good, overall, and would appear naturally as you progressed through the game. Still, there were two that most people never got and it’s not because they were bad at the game. They never got them because receiving the achievements were based entirely on random luck.
Essentially, during game play, there is a small chance that an item will drop. That item gives you the two achievements. The only way to get this item is to keep playing the game, even after you’ve long gotten every other achievement and beaten it many times in the hope that maybe you’ll win the lottery.
6. (Bonus) The Multiplayer Anti-chievement
If you are an indie game developer, please do not make multiplayer achievements for your game until you’ve got a large and thriving online multiplayer community in your game. Many games, even from small developers, will include some sort of “play against other people online” component. The trouble is that indie games tend to not have enough people on during the day for players to actually compete. So, in this case, it’s impossible to get achievements based around the multiplayer component of the game.
