Why the Xbox 360's Achievement Points Will Revolutionize Gaming

The word revolution is thrown around quite a bit when there's a discussion of next generation video game systems. The Wii was originally codenamed "The Revolution," and whether gamers are talking about Nintendo's insistence on including the casual gamer in the next-gen or the PS3's monumental graphics, the word revolution is bound to pop up.

However, it may not be the Wii's family-friendly motion connectivity or the PS3's HD brilliance that revolutionizes gaming. In fact, it may be something quite a bit more mundane--the Xbox 360's achievement points.

The idea was introduced with the Xbox 360 itself, and it's as simple as it gets; if you do something cool in a game, whether it's beating the thing, juggling zombie bodies in the air, or not taking a single shot in a war zone, you get points for your achievement to show off to other gamers on the Xbox 360's tremendous Xbox Live! gaming community.

You don't get anything but the points, and they're pretty useless. Still, gamers are competing for them--hard. It's now become a measure of how hardcore a gamer is. If they've got a lot of achievement points--if they actually beat Gears of War on the hardest level, for instance--they're a hardcore gamer, and it's out there for everybody to see. Don't mess with the dude with 10,000 kills.

The Xbox 360's achievement points also let you know what kinds of games your friends are into. Racing fans have a lot of points in racing games--simple stuff, but nobody's really introduced it before. Gamers have a way to rank themselves throughout the hundreds of games they play.

It's really exhilarating for gamers who were forced to dig through their copies of games to prove a record to a friend, or gamers who were tired of their past accomplishments meaning nothing when a new disc was popped into their system. Even casual gamers will appreciate the increased importance on playing well, and may find themselves much more involved in video games than they had been.

When gaming is made into more of a sport by forming this kind of cohesiveness through multiple games, gaming might catch on permanently in mainstream society.