Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?



Digging Under the Hood

The building is a puzzle -- like the town, like the entire game. It's a matter of finding a way up. But that's where the similarities end between the Agency Tower in Pacific City and the videogame factory in Showdown Town.

In Crackdown, you're awarded an achievement for deciphering the maze of platforms, handholds, and beams that connects the tip of the Agency Tower to the ground. But reaching the top of the videogame factory in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts isn't hard at all. It's just one more thing to check off your to-do list.

So why does this achievement, 20G: Head for Heights, feel so much better?

It should have been its own reward to climb up that Agency Tower. Instead, by capping it with an achievement, Crackdown made it official. My work and frustration and wasted time became a blip on my profile, and the 10 points didn't add up.

But it wouldn't make any sense in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts to stack the achievement points against their corresponding gameplay. That's because this is a game about unlocking achievements.


Rare's work here is so meta, it hurts. It's more meta than Portal, more meta than metal in Brutal Legend, more meta than random Flash games on Kongregate. As it goes, Banjo, Kazooie, and the remains of witch Gruntilda are washed-up game characters. They're loafing in a field when the Lord of Games whips them back into action. He's the creative force behind all videogames, a floating TV wearing Pong for a face. From the moment that L.O.G. beams the three into his latest creation, Showdown Town, we're in the new Banjo-Kazooie game.

This game, the game that you are perpetually seeing yourself play, is a contest that L.O.G. makes up on the spot. It's a standard series of challenges -- but the astounding thing is that Showdown Town isn't where the challenges happen. Those lie in worlds beyond, where characters from the series "star" in their roles and delegate the challenges to Banjo and Kazooie. You beat these time trials, races, and battles with vehicles you invent.

As far as I'm concerned, though, the real game takes place in Showdown Town -- the hub between worlds, where you can literally see the gears of the videogame factory turning in the ground.

It's here that you handle your earnings from the game. After completing challenges, you earn Jiggies that unlock more stages. That means driving to a Jig-O-Vend, physically cranking the Jiggies out of the dispenser with your wrench, lifting them one-by-one into your cart, and carting them back to the Jiggy Bank in the town square so that they can get suctioned up and processed. If you could see achievement points traveling from a game into your Gamerscore, they might look like this.


You open new worlds by wheeling a game "globe" from L.O.G.'s factory to a corresponding plinth deep in Showdown Town. On my way to opening the third world, Banjoland, my wheels slipped on the road winding down the factory mountain, and the globe toppled out of my cart as the vehicle flipped. I had to dive into the water below and fish it back out, horrified that the globe -- and my game, by extension -- might have broken. If you could see a game taking you from Level 2 to Level 3, it would hopefully look better than this.

As you go through these motions of unlocking the game that L.O.G. has devised, you naturally unlock the corresponding achievements. Among mine were 20G: Little Banker for banking 10 Jiggies, 15G: Roid Rage for working out at the town's gym, and 20G: Fuzz Off! for killing a town cop (!) that was chasing me for "smuggling" Jiggies. The familiar achievement blip might as well be another L.O.G. invention; you can almost hear the creaks of levers and groans of cogs behind it.

In fact, the narrative in this pseudo-Grand Theft Auto sandbox serves no greater purpose than to unlock more and more of the game. But why is this fun, and why do I care so much about moving forward in this game? What does Showdown Town suggest about the point of achievements? Why should Banjo and Kazooie be running and revving all over the guts of gaming instead of eating pizza and napping on that grassy field?

The easy answer is that contests are fun. But I also like unlocking worlds here because it looks and feels like unlocking a new world. When I place a game globe, a shiny television screen whirrs out of the ground and pixels flicker to life. I like finding new vehicle parts because that's what it looks and feels like, getting the crate down from a rooftop and into the hands of the town's mechanic. I like being beamed into new scenarios and uncovering the virtual terrain because it looks and feels exactly like I'm doing those things. Against a backdrop of cogs, girders, pixels, neon puzzle pieces, and vehicle parts, this is gaming drawn to scale as a big clanking machine.


Because videogames, more than other games, are about learning how a complicated machine works. Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts gives me a million things to do, all in the service of keeping that machine running. And I want the machine to keep working because it is what powers the game. If the game isn't running, I can't... play.

Which brings me back to square one: I'm cranking out achievements because it's something to do.

The difference? My work here has a visible endpoint. A Jiggy for each crank of the lever. A new level rolled right into place. So maybe that's what makes the best achievements, too. They feel like completing a circuit. The feedback is as clear as flipping a light switch.

Achievements earned: 20
Points gained: 285



Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.