First-Person Shouter

My eyes snap open in the darkness.  Oh, no.  Ohhhh, noooo.  What time is it?

11:53pm.  Shit.  Shit.

I get out of bed, stumbling around in the dark.  In the dining room, I root through my briefcase.  In the office, I dig through the pockets of my jacket.  Finally, I find my iPod Touch on the desk.

11:55pm.  Shit.  Shit.

I sit down and open MotionX-Poker, a dice poker game I have completely lost interest in playing.  I lose the first two hands.

11:57pm.  Goddamn it.  Come on.

Finally, I win a hand, then three more in a row.  That’s plenty.  I turn off my iTouch, feel my way to the next room, and get back into bed.

11:59pm.  Whew.  That was close.

This is what achievements do to gamers.

Why get up in the middle of the night to play a game I didn’t even want to?  Because MotionX-Poker has achievements.  Most of them simply celebrate standard milestones:  build a bankroll of ten millions coins, get a ten hand winning streak, win with the same hand twice in a row, play a total of 500 winning hands, and so on, the sort of accomplishments one would earn simply by playing for a while.

Then there’s the one that woke me up in a panic: the achievement for increasing your bankroll every day for fourteen days in a row.  This one requires you not only to play the game, but to play, and win, every single day for two weeks.  I’d played for twelve days straight the night my subconscious stirred me from my slumber, reminding me that I hadn’t yet played that day.  If I’d ignored it and gone back to sleep, I’d have had to start earning the achievement all over again from day one.

I’ve seen how achievements affect my behavior before.  In Team Fortress 2, for instance.  The class packs they’ve been releasing require you to earn achievements in order to unlock tasty new weapons.  Again, some of them can be acquired by simply playing the game as usual, like healing two hundred teammates, setting ten cloaked spies on fire, helping teammates kill their nemeses, etc.  Some, however, call for some non-standard behavior.

For instance, while playing as a Heavy in a particularly heated round of Dustbowl, we were making one last ditch effort to take the final point.  We rounded the last corner and ran into a crowd of enemies.  The medic trailing me hit the ubercharge.  All I needed to do was clear the way for the rest of my team.

But there was something else at the back of my mind, directing my actions: an achievement I hadn’t gotten yet.  It was called Photostroika, and it required me to taunt an enemy I had killed while invulnerable.  So, instead of mowing down the entire crowd in front of me, I killed one enemy and then hit my taunt key.  Precious seconds passed while my Heavy, still invulnerable, lovingly hugged his minigun instead of firing it.  The ubercharge ran out, the push stalled, and we lost the round.  I apologized sheepishly, but I didn’t mean it.  Screw the match, I’d gotten what I wanted: another achievement.

It’s clear I’m willing to play a game differently, even detrimentally, in order chalk up another achievement.  I’m willing to get up in the middle of the night to play a game I don’t even enjoy anymore, just to get another notch on my belt.  Those un-achieved achievements, they just bug me.  It’s like a to-do list, a bunch of chores or errands I simply cannot ignore or leave unfinished.

And yet, in my professional and personal life, I feel like all I have are uncompleted tasks and unreached goals.  My desk at work is buried in paper, mostly in the form of un-priced change estimates I need to submit to the general contractor to get paid for field work (I work for a mechanical contractor).  Despite all this work waiting for me to complete it, I’m always oversleeping and arriving late, which isn’t exactly helping me clear my in-box.

I’ve also been trying to lose weight, but haven’t been hitting the gym nearly as much as I should be.  And, there are eight big cardboard boxes in my closet taking up a massive amount of valuable space — what’s in them, I have no idea but I haven’t opened them in about five years so they can’t be critical to my everyday life.  They need to be gone through and emptied out, and yet I can never summon the motivation to do so.

Perhaps if I assigned achievements to these tasks, I would be compelled to complete them?  If it works in games, why not in real life?  If I focused seriously on fitness, wouldn’t I grow healthier and more powerful, increasing my strength and endurance just as happens in role-playing games?  If I worked diligently at my job, wouldn’t management promote me to a new level of salary and position?  If I assigned achievements to my everyday life, couldn’t I level up and unlock a better life?

I decided to try this last week, addressing my various professional and personal problems and goals, and assigning achievements to them.  Would they motivate me like they do in games?

See for yourself:  here’s a log of my week, and how I did.

Monday:  I hit the snooze button twice.  My boss is AWOL, so I spend most of the day websurfing and fiddling with my new blog.  Didn’t get around to pricing changes.   In the evening, I have to drive my insane elderly German neighbor to a homeowner’s association meeting.  Bitter that I’ve lost valuable gaming time, I skip the gym and play Operation: Anchorage until midnight.

Tuesday:  Wake up late again.  My boss is in meetings most of the day, so I write up my Operation: Anchorage review.  Don’t have time to price changes as a result.  In the evening, I’m too tired from staying up late playing games last night to go to the gym, so I stay up late playing games again instead.

Wednesday:  Hit the snooze three times.  My boss is a no-show, so I chat online with my friends about how we stayed up late last night playing games.  I do attempt to work on a change by scanning a list of materials to a vendor so I can acquire pricing, but the scanner isn’t working.  Well, I gave it a shot.  Calling IT for help definitely isn’t on the list of achievements.  At night, I’m too tired from staying up late to play games that I stay home and doze off while watching Grindhouse, which gives me nightmares about Jeff Fahey licking barbecue sauce off his fingers.

Thursday:  I hit the snooze button so many times it eventually gives up.  At the office, threatening e-mails have gotten me to do some actual work at work today.  I pick the easiest change estimate and submit pricing.  Man, I’m a workhorse.  No way can I get through four more in the same day, not with my iTunes playlists in such a shambles.  I do manage a gym visit, thanks to my wife, who is planning to go anyway, so I feel guilty enough to tag along.

Friday:  I’ll be leaving work early anyway, so there’s not much point in getting there on time.  This statement makes perfect sense to me when the alarm goes off.  After strolling in forty-five minutes late, I manage to do no work at all, but I do catch up on some webcomics I’ve been meaning to read.  I’m definitely not going to the gym on a Friday night:  I’m simply exhausted from a full week of avoiding work.  Plus, there’s a Bond movie marathon!

So.  Not a great week, achievement-wise.  One gym trip, one change estimate priced, and I pimp-slapped the snooze button so much my hand is sore.  Oh, and I completely forgot I was supposed to be dealing with all the boxes in the closet this week.  Whoops.

Looks like the achievement mentality that has me in a mad scramble in games doesn’t apply to my real life.  I’m not certain what the difference is.  Maybe it’s that I need to do these things every week, regardless: simply going to the gym three times in a week doesn’t mean I never have to go again.  Getting up on time this week doesn’t mean it’ll be any easier the next.  And, no matter how many changes I price, I guarantee there will be a fresh stack the next day.

Maybe work, chores, and fitness can’t rely on achievements.  Maybe they need to be their own reward, and for me, an obviously lazy and astoundingly irresponsible individual, I guess they’re just not.

Well, it was worth a shot.  And, just so the week isn’t a total loss, I quickly invent another achievement, and this one is already in the bag: