The Achievement Machine: Understanding the Xbox Live Metagame [Abstract]

Xbox Live Achievements and Gamerscores have become an important part of Xbox 360 gaming and have played an important role in the success of the console. Based on the framework provided by Microsoft, the community has created a rich and intriguing meta-game where the individual games become pieces of a larger whole. For every game released on the system, the developer has to define a number of achievements and attribute a number of gamerscore poits for each achievement. The total number of gamerscore points for each game has to be a thousand, but the number of achievements can be anything up to fifty and what the gamer is rewarded for is completely up to the developer. Players can look up other players to see which games they have been playing, how many achievements they have gained and their total gamerscore (see fig. 1).