For what it’s worth, my favorite Achievement ever is probably Bioshock’s Irony Achievement, from my ex-roommate Jordan Thomas’ missions in Bioshock. (From the section of Rapture called Fort Frolic.) After doing Cohen’s bidding, killing and photographing his enemies, it seemed perversely appropriate to photograph Cohen’s corpse. Getting the Irony Achievement felt like the game was acknowledging not just a required mission goal metric or an unrelated, out of context collect-10-because-we-say-you-should activity, but a stylistic action…an action taken as a form of aggressive expression on the part of the player, underpinned by a related emotional context.

But to be more precise, it seems to me that there are different kinds of completion that presumably appeal to different kinds of personality. For example, there are lots of elements of the GTA games that are clearly aimed at completionists, e.g. reaching 100% completion and collecting all packages or oysters or whatever. But there is also the satisfaction of completing all main and side missions; achieving 100% in all training tests, collecting and exporting all cars, etc. And then there’s the satisfaction of being able to create your own goal such as collecting complete sets of all armour types in Morrowind and storing them on mannequins in a secret basement you’ve built under a house you’ve acquired somehow
I guess my point is that the all those kinds of completion ‘obsession’ can co-exist with a vast open-ended game world, as long as the player doesn’t feel like they are missing out. Personally, if I haven’t looked under every rock to find every single widget or amulet or boondoggle, I won’t loose any sleep, but if I know there are *catagorically* different stories and areas and objects I didn’t get to experience, I feel a little let down – a bit like spotting a plot-hole in a movie.

As a player, I want it all. Deep and wide. Highly interactive and beautiful. Production is always something of a nightmare because we want to support more than players will ever see or touch. That’s key to what we do, imo. Because it’s often only when the player *senses* that he’s in an environment where he cannot do everything that the environment becomes interesting to me. The possibility space seems to exceed his ability to know it all; exceeds last year’s degree of responsiveness. I can see that driving some people nuts, especially completionists.

It sounds (in some respects) a similar experience to playing Okami, which I’m finally working through at the moment. I was scared that Achievements might break the magic of Braid. Okami has a few in game mechanics that are Achievement like but also incredibly rewarding and for me, the meaning and presentation enhance my emotional link with the game. Few things match the sense of inner peace and smugness I get from feeding seed to a small flock of cell-shaded song birds!