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The story
Game developer Jonathan Blow (“Braid,” “The Witness”; his new title “Order of the Sinking Star” releases 10/8) sparked discussion on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Geha”) board after remarking that achievements and trophies jerk players around, and that Nintendo made the right call by not adopting them. The thread debated whether in-game progress trackers are fundamentally different from platform-level achievements and trophies, noted that PlayStation requires trophy implementation while Steam leaves it optional for developers, and raised the harm done by a glut of low-quality games designed purely to farm trophies. Skeptics pushed back too, asking whether any actual data shows players being “jerked around,” leaving the debate split.
What people said
Wulfram, Braid, The Witness, Order of the Sinking Star (out 10/8!)
www.4gamer.net/games/968/G096803/20260930047/
External achievements cram a game's progress into a shared unit called "achievements,"
which invites comparison with other players and judging games by that metric.
That ends up turning the game into a kind of property/asset.
This breaks one of the elements of play proposed by Roger Caillois — "unproductiveness" (playing shouldn't make or lose you any property).
Once you feel you're gaining or losing something (achievements) by playing, you can't just focus on playing for its own sake anymore.
That's the problem.
In-game achievements, which are harder to pull out of the game and show off, don't cause those problems as easily,
so you get to enjoy just the upside of visualizing steady progress.
In other words, it's fine to stay silent about in-game achievements specifically.
That's just a completionist extra nobody shows off, isn't it.
It's not like it's a checklist of stuff you're clearly not required to do.
Re: #9
Same, I don't care about them either — don't think I've ever 100%'d a game's achievements on Steam.
If anything, I've got games just sitting in my purchased list at 0% achievements…
The Witness only has 2 achievements on Steam, but the PS4 version has a whopping 14 trophies.
Bet there's a Sony guideline behind that.
and you could just as easily compare in-game achievements or progress with friends if you wanted to.
You're stretching way too hard just because you want to bash achievements.
Pick a lane — are you comparing or not?
It's obvious you don't understand what I'm saying.
"You could if you tried" and "it's easy to do" are actually worlds apart.
Why can't you, though?
On PlayStation you can hide trophies on your profile and turn off notifications so you never see them at all.
Now that you mention it, never heard of any…
Honestly think it's just a vocal minority making noise.
Hard to believe a developer with this philosophy would voluntarily pile on extra achievements himself.
No hard evidence, but the "it's a guideline" theory sounds pretty convincing.
PlayStation requires trophy implementation, Steam doesn't.
Whether it's sitting in plain sight or not makes a huge difference.
Jonathan Blow never claimed that.
Read the article before you post.
Apparently that's fine because it's not "forced," lol.
Treating those as the same thing is a bit of a stretch.
But no game exists whose sole purpose is in-game achievements.
So trophies and in-game achievements look similar but are totally different.
Maybe it's not about padding playtime at all —
maybe it's meant to discourage "trophy slop" games like the ones Re: #39 mentioned, where you get a platinum in 10 minutes…
Even so, the fact that they have to resort to that in the first place kind of exposes the limits of the trophy system.
It's changed now, but apparently PlayStation's platinum trophy criteria used to include a minimum playtime requirement.
Isn't it not actually mandatory? The PS4 port of the Mega Drive version of Darius had no trophies.
Yeah, some ports of old-hardware games don't have trophies.
New releases should basically all have them though.
Both Concord and Blue Protocol (servers shut down) are games where getting the platinum trophy is now impossible forever.
Which means they'll remain permanently incomplete entries on your PlayStation account's trophy record.
Crysis 2, which required playing an online match more than six months after your last one (by then the population's dead and matchmaking won't even work, so you're stuck).
The PS3/360 era had some genuinely insane achievements, lol.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway's "917" achievement was still achievable this year too, lol.
It's just that the companies who added trophies/achievements, stuff players find annoying, are getting exactly the reaction you'd expect.
You really think they didn't weigh whether to adopt a feature their competitors use to pull in customers, lol?
"A feature that pulls in customers" —
you actually believe that, lmaooo?
does feel satisfying, I think.
Though it can also completely kill the emotional moment.
Background and key points of this discussion
Achievement systems are generally traced back to the “Gamerscore” that Xbox 360 introduced in 2005, which PS3 and later PlayStation consoles followed up on with trophies; Steam introduced its own version in 2008, but there implementation is left up to individual developers. PlayStation platforms are said to require implementation under certain guidelines in some cases, which lines up with the thread’s “Sony mandate” theory. Nintendo is one of the few major platform holders that hasn’t adopted a unified achievement feature on Switch and similar systems, and opinions always split whenever this topic comes up. Jonathan Blow is a developer with a strong authorial voice behind titles like “Braid” and “The Witness,” and he has repeatedly criticized achievements from a standpoint that values the “unproductiveness” of play. The thread divided between the philosophical argument that an external metric like achievements distorts how people play, and practical pushback along the lines of “you can just hide them if you don’t want to see them” or “they’re not much different from a progress tracker.” Both sides acknowledged the side effect of low-quality games churned out purely to farm trophies, but never agreed on exactly where to draw the line against in-game progress displays.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “Master creator Jonathan Blow: “Achievements jerk players around. Nintendo made the right call.”“
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