The Escapist Bulletin: WoW, nice score

There are nearly a thousand achievements in World of Warcraft, and Taiwanese player Little Gray has finished them all off. Well, not quite all of them - he's still got one left to do - but considering the 985 that he has completed, quibbling over one seems like splitting hairs.

The achievements in World of Warcraft were criticised for making the game too casual, but Little Gray has had to traipse all over Azeroth and Outland, defeat powerful foes before anyone else on his server, and collect dozens of pets and mounts and stuff.

Just the sheer amount of work that it must have taken is mind-boggling and about as far away from casual as you can get.

Regardless of your feelings about achievements, they are undeniably here to stay. Of course, games have always had achievements of one sort of another, be it a high score table to get to the top of, a gold medal to get, or a collection of macguffins to find. The formalised systems of achievements of this generation, be they Microsoft's gamerscore or Sony's trophies, are simply evolutions of what some of us were already doing.

That's not to say that nothing has changed, however, as the proliferation of the internet has subtly retuned our competitive edge to encompass a much more varied group than the people we can physically interact with. Getting all the Chaos Emeralds in Sonic The Hedgehog on the Genesis gave you some bragging rights with your friends, but getting them all on Xbox Live Arcade? The whole world can see that.

What's really interesting about achievements in games is how they have conflated the collecting urge that makes people want to catch all eleventy billion-trillion Pokémon with the competitive urge that makes people want to top leaderboards.

You might never have dreamed of collecting all the stars in Mario 64, but attach an award to it and you might just go a little out of your way to get 250 sniper rifle kills in Mass Effect, or spend a little bit of extra time exploring Elwynn Forrest in WoW. Achievements take the things we did 'because they were there' and adds a point value or a shiny cup to them

Bizarrely, achievements, although easy to dismiss as the purview of more casual players, actually cater to the most hardcore of players as well. You'll get achievement points just for playing the game in Gears of War, but to get all the achievement points requires not only a great deal of time and effort, but also requires the player to be rather good at the game as well. The same is true for most games, and doubly so for games with a multiplayer component.

Gaming has come a long way since the late seventies, but people are as competitive as ever. The hardcore gamer will collect all the stars, simply because that's the way they're wired, but now they have the cachet of everyone being able to see their accomplishment, while the casual gamer has something to keep them engaged while they play. Achievements literally provide something for everyone, and that's a handy thing for gaming to have on its resume.

The Escapist is the internet's leading source of news and opinion on the world of video games.