Crouching under a grove of palm trees, hidden by tall grass, I stare down the barrel of my sniper rifle patiently waiting on the American troops to come charging over the hill. My team has silently coordinated a beautiful plan of attack that has pushed our enemy into a single corner of the map. Our planes are flying above their base continually pelting their position with payload after payload of bombs weakening their attack plans. My teammates have moved our tanks into a position that should help us prevent any type of moving assault that our enemies might be assembling. With my weapon locked and loaded, my job is to pick off any ground troops attempting to flank us from either side of our position. As a further precaution, we have secured our recently seized bases with enough explosives to ensure any attempt of a hostile takeover will be extinguished by the flip of a switch. This match will be ours as long as we keep it together and hold our position. It is just a matter of minutes now….

I spent the last two weeks logging into Xbox Live to play 1 vs.100, a new online game show. 1 vs. 100 is a two-hour game show featuring live gameplay between players, multiple rounds, and a rather boring host commenting on the action. That sounds like a real game show, right? The idea of bringing a game show with real world prizes to peoples living room is very intriguing. Millions of people connect to Xbox Live everyday and this game has been designed to give anyone the opportunity to get in on the action. This is accomplished by giving gamers three ways to participate during a live show. Every round a player is chosen to be The One. This person is selected to sit center stage and answer multiple choice trivia questions in a Who Wants To Be A Million style arena. Another 100 players are selected to be a part of The Mob. Remaining players logged into the game will be part of The Crowd.

When the Xbox360 launched back in 2005 it changed the way I play games. The console itself didn’t really change things, it was the introduction of achievement points. For anyone who has been under a rock for the last four years, achievements are points that players receive for completing game-specific challenges. These challenges range from finishing a level to winning a certain number of matches against other players on Xbox Live. Every retail Xbox360 game has 1,000 available points and every Xbox Live Arcade game has 200 possible points. When points are awarded for completing challenges they are added to a players Gamerscore. A Gamerscore is an accumulative number that represents all points that have been unlocked in every game that has been played by that person. I have to hand it to Microsoft, the way they incorporated this score was ingenious, a players Gamerscore is displayed underneath their name on their Gamercard. If you don’t know, Gamercards are name tags that represent each player on Xbox Live. Every person that someone plays with during a Xbox Live match is able to see this card. In a way, the score is like bragging about how many games someone has played or how good they are at games without having to say anything. If a player looks at another players score they are able to see what achievements that player has unlocked and it shows them every game that person has played. It sounds harmless but if you dig in a little deeper there is a dark side to achievements. That brings me back to how these meaningless digital trophies have changed the way I play games.

I have been playing video games for as long as I can remember. I started gaming on my Dads Atari 7800. I spent hours on end trying to beat the high scores he had set in games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Dig-Dug and Galaga. Then I fell in love with a little game called Super Mario and gaming took a new turn for me. Games were no longer about high scores, they became about reaching the next level and saving the world.