Like a lot of you, I spent the past week-and-a-half Achievement whoring, thanks largely in part to Steam’s Summer Camp promotion.  Now that the promotion is over, I was glad to be able to go through my library, wipe out the games that I only had installed for the Achievement hunting, and get ready to spend some quality time with some of the choice selections I grabbed from the sale.

The problem though is that now, I seem to have lost the motivation.  I can’t figure out where to begin because frankly none of the games seem all that intriguing.  And I blame the Achievements.

I just spent ten days playing games like it was a task: play this game and push my way through to Achievement X, repeating sections should need be to pin down the Achievement.  That’s not fun, that’s not leisure; that’s a job.  That’s what I do at work--locate a task that needs done and work at making sure it’s done properly.

Taskmastering has become a modern standard in gaming.  MMO’s like World of Warcraft pretty much base to whole game play around giving the players a checklist of tasks to perform and let them hammer away at the list.  For gamers that have made themselves slaves to Achievements, Trophies, and Gamerscores, a game isn’t a leisure media, it’s a list of challenges the developers have made to force the players to accomplish before they give them a seal of gaming approval.

But that’s the problem for me.  The root word for ‘gaming’ is ‘game’.  A game is supposed to be fun.  I realize that, for some people, accomplishing a series of tasks is fun  (I tend to worry about those people and a psychological need to prove themselves, but to each their own), but for someone like me, that uses games to relax and decompress, the idea of throwing myself at another series of tasks on my own time is a bit abhorrent.

I assume that, in time, this burning out on games that Steam’s Summer Camp laid on me will fade, but in the meantime it has given me further appreciation for largely ignoring games’ Achievement lists