Fighting My Inner Completionism
I've had this love/hate relationship with achievements in video games since their inception almost 2 decades ago. Getting an achievement and hearing that little "ba-dunk" chime on my 360 is straight heroin in my veins. However the hate comes from the near-compulsive behavior to ruin my own fun due to the pursuit of achievements.
Some instances where the achievement is quite literally impossible to get, no issues. I accept that I can't get the multiplayer achievements when servers are shut down or the likelihood of me getting it is low due to a #skillissue. The achievements that bug the shit out of me the most are the ones you get from just playing the game. The most egregious example? Skyrim.
I initially got Skyrim on the XBOX 360 and have since gotten all the achievements. Then I got a PC and got Skyrim there. The PC died, I got an XBONE, and then got Special Edition for it. I got a PC again and then special edition was free since I already owned the original Skyrim on Steam. In all that, is now 3 games with mouth-breather levels of difficulty to achieve. If you just play the game, you'll get them all.
For all the things I am patient with, I am one impatient S.O.B. when it comes to achievement hunting. So inevitably I like to do this thing where I ruin my own fun power-leveling to try and get through the game as quickly as possible. Get burnt out. Not touch the game for months. Come back to it, realize I'm a level 66 and just started the main questline. Get this weird dissociation with my save and then restart and do the whole fucking thing over again. Then I get into a dither on if I'm wasting my time doing a playthrough on one platform when my time would be better suited doing another platform.
Why do I do this to myself? Good fucking question. I'm trying to fix this aspect of myself. Because I recognize it IS a compulsive behavior that I need to address because it IS killing my fun.
I get this sort of analysis paralysis on which platform to dedicate a specific amount of time to somewhat frequently. Especially on Minecraft where I think "oh do I want to do Better Than Adventure? Vanilla b1.7.3? r1.2.5?" It's like I know how much a time sink it can be, but I wanna sink my time into something that isn't going to inevitably get abandoned because I get bored, if that makes sense? Maybe I just need to accept that as an inevitability that I'll switch, but should leave the door open to come back.
I just beat South Park: The Stick of Truth yesterday on 360, and while I was completing achievements through gameplay, it wasn't overtaking my mental bandwidth. I just played and would occasionally do something to get me an achievement like getting a Hasselhoff nose job at Tom's Rhinoplasty to get the "Face Hoff" achievement for beating Princess Kenny while looking like The Hoff.
I also think back to games on older consoles where achievements aren't really a thing. You might have the collect-a-thon type things, but I've rarely ever bothered with those. I think I need to look at my relationship with achievements like that. Collect-a-thon objectives that really don't matter in the grand scheme of things.
At some point I just need to tell myself "You already got 50k+ gamerscore on your 360 dawg, chill tf out". I'm working on it.
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