Avatar Awards
Mishkii and I unlocked our first avatar awards last night by completing all 5 campaigns of L4D2 granting us a mini medi-kit prop each. I must admit, for such a tiny thing I was quite impressed.
I’ve seen the props on marketplace before but never bought anything due to the fact that paying money to dress up a doll ranks pretty low on my, “things I like to spend my money on” list, as opposed to say, banana Frijj which ranks considerably higher… and that only costs me 75p.
Anyway I digress. My point was, it’s about time games included unlockable doodads as something to work towards. Gamerscore does motivate me to go back and replay older games to try and tick off achievements, but its not the shiny toy it once was. After ‘x’ points the unlocks become meaningless and only major gamerpoint milestones mean anything now.
Enter avatar awards…
Finally, not only a new shiny for us all to chase, but something tangible you can use. For the longest time I’ve been of the opinion you should be able to use gamerscore for something more meaningful than bragging rights and now we have it. Not only that, but now I have incentive to grab some achievement points I maybe wouldn’t have bothered with. For example, the ‘Guardin’ Gnome’ achievement on Left4Dead2 involves carrying a garden gnome through the entire Dark Carnival campaign from start to finish. Normally I wouldn’t bother with something like this. Or at the least I’d wait till I got all the other achievements before attempting something that has the potential to make me throw a controller through my TV. But this particular achievement has an avatar award tied to it. A Depeche Mode T-shirt.
Now, I’ve been thinking about this all day and I just cant explain why I want to unlock it. I don’t even really like Depeche Mode that much but it is there, free, and waiting for me to unlock, so part of my brain automatically wants it and does not care about a rational reason. I guess you could say that about gamerscore in general, ultimately it means nothing. Not even as a judge of player skill as players can artificially inflate scores by playing a bunch of easy point games like King Kong or some other guff.
So why is it a source of motivation to me? Who knows. What I do know is that as long as there are people around who think the same way I do, Microsoft may be on to a winner here. People obsess over gamerscore and I can see the same thing with avatar unlocks. We may start seeing people renting/buying games purely because of avatar unlocks. It’s not beyond belief, I know people who rented bad games purely for the points.
I guess the big question is, will avatar unlocks convince gamers to drop a few quid on marketplace exclusive avatar items here or there? I certainly don’t feel any more likely to buy avatar items as long as I can unlock them free via games but I’d guess for plenty of others this is just the thing to bring them round to the idea.
Of course, if for some reason Monster Hunter items became available to buy Mishkii would have to cut up our credit/debit cards to stop me
