Ever since I bought an Xbox around January, I've been playing games more than once just because I try to unlock the Acheivements.
For those of you who don't know, Acheivements are just little merit-badge type things. When you're playing a game, if you meet certain conditions, you get one and it goes permanently on your gamer profile. Because your profile always stays with you, you will always carry forth this collection of Acheivements. Each of these acheivements usually has some witty name associated with it. Some achievements have are very simple to get. It could be something simple like "One Foot In The Door: Finished Act 1 on Normal Difficulty." Others are much more bizarre and difficult, such as "Kung Fu: Defeat 1000 ennemies without a weapon." Each acheivements is worth a certain amount of points in your overal "Gamerscore," which is an approximation of your worth/experience as a gamer. Easy achivements are worth a few points, like 5G, wheras tougher ones are worth 40G or 50G.
I think that everyone who writes a blog works with the same system in some way. What the Achievements represent are experiences. And while not everything that we accomplish in our lives is something to be proud of, they do have little titles, and they do have certain conditions to them, and once we've done it, whether purposely or by accident, those experiences are a part of us and can't be taken away. They stay with our profile forever.
The difference between the world of games and the real world always has to do with limitations. A game is a simulated universe, already created, already in some sense finite in what you can and can't do. The real world's difficulty lies in the fact that there are no limitations: there's no one way to finish, and moreover, you get very few hints on how to unlock new achievements that improve your Gamerscore. It's all up to you-- the thing about reality is that it is a game, but only in the way that you yourself frame it.
I'm really just anxious on the move out right now. It feels like waiting for this is putting all other things in my life on hold.
