achievement unlocked (flashpoint retrospective #4)

15 Mar, 2024

today's flashpoint retrospective is ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED by jmtb02 (real name John Cooney), the legend who brought us the famed Elephant Collection (including titles like This is the Only Level (plus sequels), Elephant Rave (plus sequels), Run Elephant Run, Obey! the Game, and Elephant Quest). this goddamn collection of elephant flash games¹ DOMINATED armor games and kongregate when i was younger. which like, not complaining, they're all quite fun and well made from memory, but it's kinda funny to think about how my various childhood video game icons stack up next to each other. we got mario and pokemon and uhhhh... this blue elephant!

even before you are spat out into the single platformer level that makes up the entirety of the game, the armor games loading screen cheerfully floods you with half a dozen achievements for just booting the darn thing up. that's right, achievement unlocked is yet another meta-game (if you can believe it, with a title like that), and this time the name of the (...meta...) game is: get all the achievements! you get achievements just for moving left, achievements just for moving right, achievements just for hitting certain keys or scrolling with the mouse.

i am ABSOLUTELY here for this. i love to complete arbitrary tasks! it's one of my genuine favourite things to do in video games! currently i am playing Cozy Grove by Spry Fox on the Nintendo Switch (would recommend for a daily straightforward hour or two of running around a cute island and completing cute, simple objectives), which at its bare bones is a series of fetch quests and searches and decorating tasks. there is much relaxation to be found in utter meaninglessness, and maybe at some point i'll write yet another essay on it. whomst is to say.

achievement unlocked made me think quite a bit about how we play games now. even when i was a kid, i was soooo reliant on the internet, banking on the fact that somebody had done it before me, and that if i ran up against a wall all that i'd need to do is google what to do next. there's nothing stopping anybody from googling what to do next in a game. but a lot of us actually abhor spoilers (more on that later) and utterly HATE it when people "spoil" puzzles or surprises or difficult spots.

a few months back, i watched my roommate play through the award-winning indie darling Inside (brought to us by our friends at Playdead). a secret part of inside involves going back through levels and scouring them for certain... let's say collectibles, not because i'm trying to be coy but because i can't think of a better word for them. there is an achievement for each collectible you successfully locate, and each of those achievements' titles is a hint towards the collectibles' locations.

originally i just read where they were and played a hot-or-cold game with my roommate, but quickly we found that that's not actually very. fun. so instead i scrolled verrrry carefully to avoid location spoilers, instead just identifying the titles, feeding them to my roommate, and then partaking in the fun of searching around the level and sniffing out the collectibles on our own terms. in the face of the internet's overflowing game knowledge, we created our own game, manufacturing out of the saturated tutorial landscape the original intentions of the developers: to search based on a few tantalising hints, presumably accessible via steam's alluring achievements page.

my older friends assure me that game knowledge used to be propelled via word-of-mouth -- look at the mew under the truck urban legend! now it is far, far harder to avoid spoilers than it is to find them. developers have always made reflexive meta-games in response to insatiable gamer curiosity and drive to succeed, but it feels like this genre and cultural awareness has skyrocketed in popularity -- just look at Inscryption (Daniel Mullins Games) as an example of commentary on card games, or Dan Salvato's Doki Doki! Literature Club as a response to the prescriptive structure of trashy anime ren'py² dating sims.

when i first heard about inscryption, it was from a brian david gilbert video. his pitch for inscryption is as follows:

"...and if you haven't played Inscryption*... I would love to talk about it, but I also don't wanna tell you anything. It really is a game you should just go into with no prior knowledge.*"

the idea that a game may hold unknowns is one of the biggest modern pulls, at least in my experience. so! much! has been done already!!! and there are always leagues and leagues of people with big important opinions about what has already been done and what ought to be done next and augugghguh there's so MUCH pulling you in every single direction when it comes to video game opinions. which kinda sucks, because one of my favourite gaming experiences is to go into a game blind and fall in love with it/get freaked out of my mind/be emotionally and personally challenged without knowing a single damn thing about it. look at dan's blind reactions in the game grumps doki doki literature club playthrough! that's utter horror and terror and bafflement that you just cannot get if you have read even a single darn thing about ddlc! i've potentially ruined ddlc for some people by even MENTIONING that it's Not As It All Seems!

in the information age (or i guess, increasingly, the misinformation age), it is so so so so important to treasure what we don't yet know. in 17776 by jon bois, and PLEASE put everything you're doing down to go read this before you do literally anything else and that INCLUDES finishing this blog post, in 17776 there's this great line that... huh. actually. scratch that. i'm not telling you the line at all. go find it for yourself. seriously, it's worth it.

which brings me right the hell back to achievement unlocked. i played through almost the whole dang thing without looking up a SINGLE achievement, i guess because i wanted to prove to myself that. idk, my brain was working well enough to not NEED to rely on walkthroughs all of the time? i had a vision in my brain of achievement unlocked as an untouched representation of my halcyon youth and i didn't want to sully it by throwing in the towel? i wanted to prove that i was a god gamer??? whatever the reason, and i'm still kinda unsure even now, i went through almost the whole thing without searching up any hints. and finally when i was well and truly stuck, i clicked on the handy hint button, which redirected me... to a 404 site.

readers, when i tell you that was a gut punch. i found another fandom website detailing all the achievements, but it wasn't the same. just as the current Gaming Culture may seem overpowering and eternal, that little 404 was a massive reminder that actually it's not even a little bit. we ought to treasure and maintain our internet resources, especially the ones that are made out of love and care and passion and a desire for all people playing the game to have as much fun as everybody else. as much as i may rage against the ills of the internet, the fact remains that the death of that little guide stung, and the death of all little guides everywhere will sting me for a long, long time. thank you to the writer of that one fandom page. thank you to everyone who points other players in the right direction. and thank you to everyone who works damn freaking hard to play games on their own terms, always.

-aries

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