Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Achievement Point Phat Lewt

I continue to delight in my XBox 360.

I don't finish games.  I'm just not that person.  I must have bought.. oh, an awful lot of games in the last two decades.  I have enjoyed a great many of them.  But I've probably only finished (where that is possible) two or three that don't have the word "Civilisation" in them.  As Raph Koster describes, I tend to play, find the key, learn the patterns, grok them, then immediately lose interest in continuing.  And yes, i am aware that to certain girls from my past, that may ring a bell.

But the 360 has a new feature: achievement points.  When you pass certain milestones, which vary from game to game, you get a little "ding", and your XBox Live online profile is updated with extra points to reflect your new uber-leetness.  Games come with about 1000 points for a full-price game, and around 200 for a Live Arcade downloadable game.

So, for example, finish Project Gotham 3 on silver diffiulty and you'll get points (fifty, i think).  Finish a mission-series in Call of Duty 2 on Veteran and you;kk get sixty points.  Win with a backgammon in the Live Arcade version of the game and get ten or fifteen points.  You can see my gamer card here, with (currently) a respectable 1010 points, giving me temporary bragging points over my friends, the nearest of whom has 425.

This means I am metagaming like a true Bartle Achiever.  I have already completed Call of Duty and Project Gotham.  The latter I would have done anyway.  The former?  Unlikely, especially within a couple of weeks.  I am getting to see more now that there is a point to the games beyond just cracking the game's patterns.  Now, like an MMO, there is a point in catassing ;)

Achievement points are also a great selling point.  I look at games to see which have low-hanging fruit in the achievement points (hands up Kameo and EA's Madden 2006).  I will rent games I would never normally play, just to get some more of those sweet, sweet points.

One last thing.  If you are looking for achievement points, shun Tiger Woods 2006 like the devil that it is.  The points are all for online play.  And many are utterly ungettable.  Play 1000 games?  That would be forty or so days solid, 24-hours a day!  Rank number 1 in the world in a game mode for thirty or forty points?!?  This means that, if I play like the devil for, like, ever, and turn out to be the single best player in the world at stroke play, I get less points than for finishing the training mission in Call of Duty 2.  EA, there is a place you can put that, but it won't be pleasant, and you'll deserve a good few achievement points for your discomfort.

Performance Appraisals and other Weaselry

Oh joy: the time of the year when performance reviews and appraisals come round.

I hate this stuff.  I don't hate it through fear: I'm good at what I do, and I've not punched a single person this year*, so I'm pretty sanguine about the process vis-a-vis myself.  Of course, I am aware that, in an attempt to moderate my salary demands, the company will try to come up with some spurious complaint ("You've been eating too much cheese this year, Keith.  Eating excessive cheese is just picking the pocket of the company as a whole").  But, basically, I've launched products that work first time, on budget and on time.  With me, you can have all three.

What I hate is the paperwork, the negotiation, the "justify your existence" stuff, and most of all the third-party, "grass on your mates" review process.

I have worked for an awful lot of companies in my time.  Being a contract-developer does that to you.  And what I have discovered is that, while sales and marketing have bad reputations amongst techies, the only people who actually make your life more miserable as an employee are the human resources lot.  Now my aunt is a personnel director, so I should point out that I have met lovely H.R. people in my time, and worked in companies where they were essentially non-malign.  Some of my best friends, you might say, work in H.R.  But everybody I know shivers with fear when they see a general-circulation memo from Human Resources pop into their inbox.

So now I have to do 3rd party reviews for four people.  The process is rather like a trial for witchcraft.  If I fail to denounce them properly (ie if I am uncritical) then I am not "engaging fully in the review process".  Of course, "engaging fully in the review process" is one of my official targets for the year, and if I fail to do so then my assessment grading - and therefore bonuses - for the year may be lower.  Not least since the people that set up the review process in all its weaselly glory (HR) are the people who decide on the allocation of bonuses.

My solution?  Don't care.  Last year I broke the rules and sent everyone I did reviews for a copy of the document.  "Never say anything about someone you wouldn't say to their face" isn't a bad rule to try and stick to.  Yes, I was told off for it, on the unspoken grounds that this lets them prepare a defence.  See, again, under "don't care".  My colleagues tend to be my friends, and I'm not going to give them any advice they need through the proxy of a vengeful H.R. department.  Those who I work with who I feel deserve to be fired are aware of my opinion and will not ask me to do reviews for them.  I wish they would, though.  I'd even send them a copy.

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*Not in work.  On the rugby pitch, I'm afraid, is a very different matter.