When Microsoft released the Xbox 360 in the autumn of 2005, with Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Nintendo’s Wii already announced but still a year away from store shelves, journalists like myself were focused on system specs, launch titles and initial shipment volumes. Few of us were thinking about Achievements and what they could mean for games. Now, while I’m certainly willing to own up to my then-myopic obsession with the coming console war, part of the reason that I failed to consider their implication is that Microsoft introduced them side-by-side with Gamerscore, like a pair of Siamese twins. That’s why I found it difficult to separate the two until much later.

To this day I don’t get the value of Gamerscore’s cumulative tally of points across disparate and often unrelated games – other than as a pointless measuring stick. Is it measuring skill? Time invested? Brand loyalty? Disposable income? The time-twisting 2D platformer Braid, however, woke me up to the potential of Achievements with its very simple implementation: for merely traversing each of the worlds that were open to me, I got an Achievement. ‘Traversed World 2’, the game said, accompanied by that distinctive and increasingly Pavlovian tone.

On first blush, that isn’t very special. But if you’ve played Braid, you know that some of the worlds aren’t easy to navigate from beginning to end, and even if you traverse a world from start to finish, you very likely haven’t obtained all of the puzzle pieces necessary to complete that world. Not on your first attempt, anyway. Without that recognition of our partial accomplishment, we might start to feel discouraged, especially by some of the later worlds, where it’s not uncommon to exit having only acquired one puzzle piece or none at all. By giving players a pat on the back for getting from point A to point B, Braid subtly exhorts us to gird ourselves for the inevitable return – and re-return – to each world in order to finish the associated puzzle.

Even more interesting than the use of Achievements as in-game pep talks is when they’re employed to encourage what I call the ‘off-label’ use of a game. And no, I don’t mean using the disc as a coaster. I mean games like Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, with its Pacifism Achievement, described as ‘Survive the first 60 seconds of the game without firing’. What I liked about this Achievement is that it inspires us to try playing the game in a manner that’s rather different from its original intent. Even the fact that I have yet to, er, achieve this Achievement didn’t obscure its potential. And when Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 debuted, Pacifism had been promoted from an off-label Achievement to a dedicated game mode, with the Wax On (‘Rub your ship along all four arena walls in Pacifism’) and Wax Off (‘Perform the Wax On achievement twice in a single game, don’t forget to breathe’) taking its place on the Achievement list.

I don’t mean to suggest that off-label uses of videogames are a new invention. Think of speed runs, which the majority of traversal-based titles don’t explicitly support, yet a minority of players have a go at it anyway just to see how quickly they can complete a level or a game. Or think of iron man playthroughs: one life only – no reloads, no continues – where if you die, it’s game over. One of the most interesting series of blog posts I’ve read in recent months has been Ben Abraham’s multipart entry on replaying Far Cry 2 under iron man conditions, where the penalty for death is the end of that playthrough. Abraham undertook these dispatches out of curiosity as to whether the threat of permadeath would add more weight to in-game choices and decisions. From my perspective, the narrative impact of off-label play is of less interest than its interactive impact, because the more we learn about how people can play a particular game, the richer we can make it.

That’s where, in my opinion, Microsoft’s Achievements (and Sony’s Trophies), could stand to evolve. For while developers would be wise to expressly recognise and enable off-label play, much of this is activity generated outside of the development community and among the larger base of gamers themselves. So why not empower them to recognise each other with user-generated Achievements?

Imagine that Microsoft allotted each game between 50-100 points for Achievements that players themselves could create and name from among a number of in-game variables – lives, health, completion time, accuracy and much more. Players get to challenge friends and strangers alike to beat their tests; developers get a slew of additional information about how their games are played in the wild; and Microsoft (or Sony) gets another way to make the games for their respective systems even stickier. Because if you’re going to make an off-label use of a game, why shouldn’t the industry make an off-label use of you? 

N’Gai Croal is a writer and videogame design consultant. You can follow him online at ncroal.tumblr.com.