Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Achievement Porn

petermichaud.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 122 posts

Re: Achievement Porn

#91

Post by rick_2047 »

barrkel wrote: post #6
rick_2047 wrote: post #2

I don't agree with the author on one point, not all achievement in a game are "fake". Well, that actually depends on your perception of the definition of what is fake. In my opinion, if you actually solve a problem, a puzzle or a quiz in a game that amounts up to a "real" achievement.

Please explain what you mean by "real achievement". At a minimum, I would think that it must include making people's lives better, directly or indirectly. By that metric, solving a puzzle - e.g. sudoko - is fake, as the puzzle could be solved much more efficiently e.g. by a computer program, and the human effort put into solving it could be much more productive - and "real" - elsewhere.

You cannot always say dat a puzzle can be solved much efficiently by a computer. And after all we have to program the computer to do so, and for that first we have to understand the problem itself (at least partially).

Re: Achievement Porn

#93

Post by kingsley_20 »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #31
sgoranson wrote: post #19

Trying to define what should be meaningful for other people is pretty arrogant and an insular perspective on life. My personal take on reality is that the whole shebang is a "meaningless treadmill", but I'm willing to accept that it might not be true for the next guy.

I agree. My take on this essay is that it is but an early milestone on the path to enlightenment. It asks an interesting question, but ends in a total cop-out, where the author literally claims that divining the meaning of life is "easy": The easy part to culling the bullshit is to ask yourself: Is this activity making a positive, tangible difference in my life or anyone else’s life? Easy for him , maybe. It's fine t…

You're right. I play life because it's more fun to pretend that it's real than succumb to the inaction which would be the only logical response to the idea that it's not.

In other words, I seek the coin under the lamp rather than in the dark corner I lost it in, and I'm fine with that.

Re: Achievement Porn

#94

Post by nostrademons »

starkfist wrote: post #39
Alex3917 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merit is continuous and not discrete. When you take a continuous function and try to make it look discrete, what you'll notice is that there is 'some extra' between the actual merit curve and the stepwise function that touches it. These so-called meritocracies are just a way to skim that extra off the top. Look at it this way, if you went in to take music lessons and your music teacher told you that in order to get t…

Look at it this way, if you went in to take music lessons and your music teacher told you that in order to get to 'level 3' trumpet player you'd need to spend X years and Y thousands of dollars, you'd instantly see it was ridiculous. There are widespread teaching systems for musical instruments that work exactly like this. Especially for piano and orchestral instruments. There are organized competitions for different…

Having played violin 2 for most of college and violin 1 for most of high school, I'd like to believe that the difference between first and second violins is whether you enjoy playing in the high register, and not your level of ability. Certainly the principal second of an orchestra is usually a better player than all but the first few stands of first violins.

Though you're right, there is a pecking order by stand number, and another one for outside vs. inside players.

Curiously, when I was in MA All-States in 2000, the conductor did an experiment. He reversed the seating order, temporarily putting the worst players up front and the best ones behind. And the orchestra as a whole played a lot better. When they couldn't hide in the back, the weaker players played out and followed the conductor much better, yet the better players continued to do so regardless of where they were placed. Unfortunately, we couldn't do this for the concert (social conventions being what they were), but the hour or so devoted to the experiment certainly worked out.

Make of this what you will.

Re: Achievement Porn

#95

Post by zackattack »

jim-greer wrote: post #38
proxy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked

Play it on our site and the achievements are permanent and public: http://www.kongregate.com/games/ArmorGames/achievement-unloc...

LOVE kongregate and armor games

Re: Achievement Porn

#96

Post by DLWormwood »

gridspy wrote: post #69
CoryOndrejka wrote: post #13

"Any achievement in a video game is a fake achievement" This is a great soundbite to build an essay around but ignores two decades of learning, cognitive, and psychological research. There are too many examples to try to pack into a comments, but among the most obvious: - 3D games are have been demonstrated to have positive effects on spatial perception and to allow rehearsal-based training for real-world activities…

How about : Any achievement the game rewards you for is a fake achievement. Whenever I go up a level in WoW, or gain a kill in Quake, or beat a boss and pick up his loot I have a fake achievement. Sure, there are some real achievements in there, but they are not provided by the game world - they are almost a side effect. Most likely they are not the reason that people are playing these games, but they are a useful ex…

> Consider how much real achievement we would see if all the motivated hackers put down WoW and started up their development environment of choice.

This is a big part of why I quit WoW late last year. I wanted to take one last stab at self-employment before turning 40. (Yes, yet another wannabe iP* developer) While having a day job and playing WoW prior to the achievement system wasn't a problem for me, having to be self-motivated to work with a constellation of "Achievements" at arm's reach probably cost me about 3-4 months of self-funding time getting underway.

Re: Achievement Porn

#97

Post by Confusion »

sgoranson wrote: post #19

Trying to define what should be meaningful for other people is pretty arrogant and an insular perspective on life. My personal take on reality is that the whole shebang is a "meaningless treadmill", but I'm willing to accept that it might not be true for the next guy.

He's not trying to define what should be meaningful: he simply accepts what people actually claim they consider to be meaningful and shows how their behavior does not lead to the kinds of achievements that they themselves consider meaningful.

Re: Achievement Porn

#98

Post by vilya »

aoriste wrote: post #67

I had read the first article already, and this one provided an interesting commentary. What struck me most, however, was the striking parallel it makes to a distant, hazily defined, mmo game that a friend and I talk about creating in our twilight years. This game would simply be a massive simulation of a fantasy setting, replete with deep and meaningful (in an in-game sense) game-object detail, but which would offer…

Isn't that exactly what "Second Life" is?

Re: Achievement Porn

#99

Post by vilya »

The author decries meaningless achievements without ever saying what he considers to be meaningful. This is nothing more than a load of badly thought through opinions that the author attempts to pass off as insights.

Re: Achievement Porn

#100

Post by Retric »

gridspy wrote: post #84
Retric wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, an achievement is "real" when your actions are what separates a reasonable chance of failure and success. Thus the classic MMO grind fest, or a slot machine could be called fake achievements, but most PVP kills are actually fairly complex achievements.

Your skills are real, your achievement is meaningless. I am an awesome Natural Selection (the FPS RTS) commander. I have lead epic campaigns back and forth across the game map against huge odds. When I played, my team often told me that I was doing a great job. Then, I won. The game went "well done" and all that hard work turned into nothing. Sure, I had skill, but I had achieved nothing but entertainment and wasted…

After the heat death of the universe everything done by anything becomes meaningless. Your actions increased the happiness of other people for some period of time, abstractly that's about all you can do. Granted creating a fun video game or a more effective solar cell are on a larger scale, but it's still the same basic thing.
Post reply on HN