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?
Zombies On Your Lawn
On most days, PopCap is my favorite game developer in the world, thanks to the likes of Peggle, Bookworm, and Chuzzle. Many games feel like complex things; they're weird hybrids of cinema and math, theater and animation, technology and performance art. And they always feel caught someplace in between: Does it matter that the gameplay in Mass Effect is kind of boring, when the writing is so great? Should I overlook the racial stereotypes in Street Fighter IV for the sophistication of its mechanics? Can you really say Fallout 3 is an immersive world when bugs keep breaking the illusion?
It's often hard to know what to care most about. Games are a strange agglomeration of media that some say are held together by play. But playing Mass Effect is miles away from playing Street Fighter IV. One wants to shed its pen-and-paper origins and become something more, an interactive fable about the human condition. The other wants you to transcend your weaknesses and fears and become the best player that you can be. How much can you really say, after a point? Why not just play?
PopCap just wants you to play. The studio's games do not feel like complex things -- although they probably are, on the drafting table and under the hood. Instead, they feel perfectly clear on what they are and where they stand. When you play them, so do you. These are exquisite distractions; you want to waste your time.
Everything in Plants vs. Zombies, PopCap's great missive to the hardcore, feels like a distraction. In each level, a new zombie type is introduced. Next level, a corresponding new plant is doled out. You knock out the lone zombie in the middle row. Then you see another creeping along the bottom. Some sunbeams drift into sight. "A huge wave of zombies is approaching!" One of them drops a coin. You pick it up. Now the wave is gone. So is your Melon-pult. When did that happen?
Levels generally occur in two phases. In the first phase, you build your plant defenses while dealing with trouble as it comes; in the second phase, you've built your defenses and sit back and watch, and listen. The screen is a traffic jam of flying peas and flailing limbs. These play a John Cage-like symphony of vegetable and butter and heads popping off. You don't have much left to do but zone out to this absurd screensaver of your own making. It is full of texture and color. But what happened to play? Isn't this, once again, about the value of art and music in a game?
I grabbed every achievement in Plants vs. Zombies -- a personal first. Most aren't hard to get. Take 10G: Shopaholic (buy $25,000 worth of upgrades from Crazy Dave), 20G: Explodonator (kill 10 zombies with one Cherry Bomb), and 15G: Close Shave (finish a level with no lawnmowers left). You'll get them by playing as usual; they take no special effort. So it's surprising that these achievements feel integral to the Plants vs. Zombies experience, better somehow than the canned rewards other games offer for completing Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, and so on.
I went out of my way for only two achievements. 25G: Alive and Planting was for reaching wave 40 in the game's "survival endless" mode. On one hand, the meaning of hitting a milestone in a survival game is pretty obvious. It's not easy; you need to understand how to maximize the damage of your plants while positioning them just out of zombie reach. You need to be prepared to patch up a sudden catastrophe, like a jack-in-the-box zombie exploding and taking out half your frontline defenses. You have to do this while saving sunbeams for expensive upgrades and repairs. So 40 waves is a good achievement.
On the other hand, once you hit wave 15 or so, you're again spending your time mostly watching. It's a tower-defense game; waiting for the invasion to blow over is part of the concept. And after wave 15, the action gets so intense that only the computer can truly keep up (and barely; I can't think of another Xbox 360 game with such drastic and frequent slowdown). Many tower-defense games, like Defense Grid: The Awakening and GeoDefense, are made to look beautiful in those dead moments when your defenses outweigh the attackers. Once that happens, they're also a little boring for removing you from the algorithm. Not so with Plants vs. Zombies. Watching these fireworks is never tiresome. Why not?
15G: Smarty Branches is the achievement gotten for growing the Tree of Wisdom to 100 feet. This sounds like a nice diversion, but it's not. It costs $250,000 to buy the necessary food. You have to spend weeks farming the game and the Zen Garden for coins. And this is the thing: You'd think the Zen Garden would be a relaxing space outside the game proper, a place to enjoy the calming music and rows of bobbing plants. You'd think that merely farming the Garden would be boring. Neither of these things hold true. If you don't collect the coins fast enough, the plants stop producing them. Your snail helper, Stinky, falls asleep on the job if you don't feed him chocolate. The mushrooms also doze off, forcing you to wheel them away. It's a little predictable, but it's no grind. It doesn't feel like farming or Zen Gardening at all. It feels like playing.
When you sit back and watch Stinky pick up coins, and watch your lines of defenses hurl peas and corn and butter, and watch zombies fall down, you aren't just watching art and animation. You're watching the game play itself. Zombie shuffles leftward; is hit in face with cabbage. Zombie loses head; sunflower bobs happily. Because every sight and sound of a PopCap game provides some thrill, encourages you to keep on playing, and makes sure you are having a good time, you don't separate assets and art and writing from gameplay like you normally do. Everywhere you turn, you get a (not-so-guilty) pleasure. A Melon-pult tossing a watermelon that shatters on a zombie's bucket? It's not just an expensive yet effective unit doing its job. It's also a blast. You're playing even when you're just watching.
Here's why I made a point of getting every last achievement. In the purest, simplest, and least ambitious way, it was fun. This is telling, too: Growing the Tree of Wisdom doesn't only get you the achievement points. It also unlocks a cheat code that makes the zombies dance.
Achievements earned: 12
Points gained: 200
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.