achievement unlocked…
Posted by jaked | Filed under just4fun, so i was thinking the other day...
ok so with halo: reach coming out tonight at midnight i thought i would try to let you into a little bit of my nerdy side (ok who are we kidding, i’m all nerdy side) and share with you something that i’m currently really discovering about myself through video games. ok so the other night i downloaded the demo to crackdown 2 on the xbox live marketplace. i played the first game and remember liking it but not remembering it much, and the sequel wasn’t even really on my radar.
so when i fired up the 30 minute demo suddenly it call came back to me. i remembered that when i played the first game i was all about collecting agility orbs, which make your character run faster and jump higher… so much so that i completely ignored the story of the game and just collected the green colorful orbs floating around on rooftops. i don’t think i even finished the story in the game. it was almost at a level of someone addicted to a crack like substance… i just had to get my fix… and collect all of the orbs. (insert lame pokemon joke here)
i then preceded to play through the demo three or four times primarily just collecting the same orbs over and over again. i feel like this obsessive trait really shows up primarily in my video game playing than anywhere else. it really results in some odd gaming habits and tendencies. (most of which i’m probably not too proud of)
i think it’s this weird obsessive compulsive nature that has me so into the xbox 360′s achievement. this achievement system awards arbitrary points for completing things in the game. now these points do absolutely nothing for you, you can’t spend them, you don’t get anything for having lots of them… really they are completely worthless… but i wear them like a red badge of courage.
while i wouldn’t say that i pursue these achievements in an unhealthy fashion, i do admit to some… questionable methods of raising my gamerscore (the arbitrary achievement points) but i have played completely garbage games for the sheer reason to increase my points. for example, i used gamefly to rent king kong and avatar the last airbender because they are both notorious for being easy achievement games. (avatar took maybe 2 minutes to get all 1000 points that a game allows, king kong took maybe 3 hours total)
i really try not to think about what this says about me as a person…
i think it’s this same thing that drew me to ‘secretly’ start playing forsquare again and what has me excited about the iphone’s new ‘gamecenter’ (which since it has come out i’ve lost interest in all games that don’t have achievements) i am an achiever…
i’m kind of a goal person, i kind of schedule my day around tasks. when i get up i have a list of stuff that i have to do before i can sleep again, or just become a flurry of stress lying in bed. it doesn’t matter if it’s mpd stuff like making phone calls and appointments, stuff to do around the house, stuff like blog posts, (which without a computer are freaking hard on the iphone, this probably has been almost a week in the making) or even hanging out with family and friends. all of these things are like little tasks that i can check off all compartmentalized and stored away for future reference. yes i am in part a box checker.
i can tell you that this in no way means i am organized. really it just sort of highlights my obsessive nature. like when i was a kid i would only take an even number of steps in a square on the sidewalk and would stutter-step or jump in order to keep the streak going. also whenever i was in the car on a road trip and there were like telephone poles or even the lines on the highway my had could be open in between the polls but as soon as we went by one my had had to be balled up in a fist during that time.
occasionally i’ll actually still find myself doing these things but for the most part i’m past all of the weirdness. (and i mean who isn’t a little weird as a kid?) one thing that i’ve tried to do is to trick myself into using this for good instead of evil. i’ve really seen some cool stuff happen because of this in the world of mpd and in weight-loss. it was cool because in these cases the ‘achievements’ yielded real results.
the problem i keep running into is not quickly making new goals after i accomplish my old ones. like when i was wanting to run in a race in bozeman i trained hard because i had a goal. after the race was over i totally lost interest in running for exercise. losing weight and keeping it off has been increasingly difficult once i hit my goal of losing 70ish lbs.
how about you? what are some ways that you’ve found help you get things done? how do you stay motivated when results aren’t explicitly right in front of you? do you want to add me as a friend on xbox live? my gamertag is FAITHintheKNIFE.
