Comment on Are achievements still relevant in 2026—especially when mods disable them?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week agoThey tell you exactly what rewards you with them in most cases. They’re finite and not random. They’re hard coded and easily searchable. The point of a Skinner box is that the mouse doesn’t know when the next reward comes. I’m not prepared to say “most” definitively, but at least many achievements don’t require any repetition and are given out for one bespoke action exactly one time, often just as checkpoints for how far you made it into a story.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 1 week ago
Most people do not look up all the achievements before they play. So, to them, it appears random, as they just pop up spontaneously as they play. And they usually start of with a bunch and get further apart as time goes on and the harder achievements take longer, so the time varies in much the same way as all those mobile games that have some sort of action economy
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I don’t buy it. If achievements were addictive, more people would finish games, and one of the things that we learned from achievements data is that even a 50% rate of finishing a game is rare. The Skinner box conditions behavior when you know that doing a thing sometimes results in a reward or the avoidance of a punishment, and that doesn’t mesh with an achievement that only rewards an action once rather than continually handing it out occasionally for repeating an action.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip 1 week ago
There are people that buy awful games just to 100% them and get the achievements. They actively search out things which give easy achievements. Not because the game might be fun, just to see number go up.
Not everything is addictive in the same way to everyone. So I don’t really care what you “buy”, it’s a behavior that exists in the real world.