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?



It's Not Personal

Here's my story of getting the 15G: Treaty achievement in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.

It was attempt number 15 or 50 -- I couldn't remember. At this point, I was playing on automatic. My left thumb jerked monotonously like a force-feedback prosthesis that had seen better times. The shapes had long coalesced into a neon glob that was leaving bright bits of itself all over my consciousness. The machine made up its mind before my mind could quite catch up. Somehow, a path cleared, and I raced for the last safe zone, my body pointed like an arrow toward the yawning exit. Finally, the device chimed. I slumped backward with relief and exhaustion. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.

Oh -- sorry. I was only aping better writers.


Personal stories about gaming are overrated, aren't they? Often, they read like pleas for attention disguised as meaningful interpretation. You don't want to hear the story of my Geometry Wars achievement. This is because you have your own story about getting the achievement. Or you don't. It doesn't matter. Whatever you do in the game, I'd argue, says more about the designer than yourself.

For instance, the particular combination of plasmids and gene tonics you used to complete BioShock was entirely a personal matter -- but your gaming story paled in comparison to the bigger story that the game told every player.

A big part of the Geometry Wars story is how the main game teaches new tricks through its achievements. Achievements in most games are little more than milestones or branches off the tree. If they don't mark your progress in the main storyline, then they are purposeful digressions from that path.


Think of Geometry Wars achievements more as segments of a telescope, extending outward only to expand your sense of the original: a rectangle filled with shapes that you shoot. The retro purism of Geometry Wars -- the points and physics, the blips and bombs -- begins and ends within this arena of targets. This amuses you for a time. But then the contemporary gamer in you starts looking for more.

The Magpie achievement asks you to collect 500 geoms in a single game. Up until now, you'd barely noticed these flickering green ephemera, the remains of annihilated shapes, which quietly increased your score multiplier. Now you're concerned with exponentially growing your score. You're a geom farmer. Suddenly, the game resembles a complex Cave shoot-'em-up like DoDonPachi. And you have an achievement, rather than a tutorial, teaching you to play.

Basics pile upon basics. Geoms draw your attention, but also draw your ship into the crossfire of shapes. You start to picture your ship's invisible hit box, the zone in the center of its body that you must keep from touching enemies. You think you have a firm grasp of the basics, and then you read the Phobia achievement, which asks you to score 1,000 points in Waves mode without the help of geoms. Now you have to avoid geoms like the plague. You just realized that they resemble little bits of bacteria.

Now the Rebound achievement asks you to shoot enemies by reflecting your shots off the surfaces of gates in the arena. Your view of the game fractures as if seen through a cracked mirror, the straight lines all bent and unpredictable. Then the Slalom achievement, which challenges you to cross five gates in five seconds, makes you ponder the mass of your ship and the force of its thrusters. This isn't Forza Motorsport 3 -- you're steering an abstract outline. Yet, you wonder, how fast can it go when you push it to the limit?


In Wax On, you race your ship around the arena perimeter. You have to trace the full rectangle before the blue diamonds catch up to you. You might think that this is a frivolous distraction from the real Geometry Wars, but a dotted line follows your ship, indicating your coverage -- and a little counter at the bottom tells you you're 10, 50, 100% done with the achievement. At this point, it's been stretched in a dozen different directions, with little doubt that you're still playing the same game. Not a mini-game, but the game.

When I finally earn 15G: Wax Off for making two loops -- tracing the dotted rectangle and then erasing it -- it's a glorious moment. But that doesn't matter. What does is that Waxing Off is not at all like Waxing On. It's entirely possible to do one loop without straying from the border. On the second loop, the enemies have accumulated, and you're guaranteed to find that a clump of blue diamonds has spawned directly in your path. You'll have to retreat from the edge, maybe detonate some gates in the arena to defend yourself, and then return to the edge, taking a much more strategic approach to your task. It's a constant dance between the middle and the edge. You might also notice that you only have to skirt the edge to mark coverage. This is harder than hugging the wall, but shaves precious seconds off your time.

Your achievements in Geometry Wars refine your taste for the game. Essentially, they encourage you to become an expert, quickly aware of how the blue diamonds in King mode actually go faster and faster as you circle the arena for that Treaty achievement, heading for the final safe zone. The narrowing distance between you and your pursuers feels like a force of gravity. And it's this unlikely combination of primal and refined knowledge that might point to the heart of gaming.

No small feat for a handful of 15-point achievements.

Achievements earned: 2
Points gained: 30



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.