What kind of video game player are you?

[by-tor]

I think there has to be at least a few more types.

I like to cheat in single player games. I like omnipotence.

I also like to just enjoy the story or in a really good game, decide where the story is going to go.

I do agree that a good game, just like a good book or movie, provides some kind of social fulfillment. It keeps you company, in a good way.

[Tabby_Cat]

@BigT

I do not see how getting achievements is exploring the limits of the game. The limits of the game are in what you are and are not able to do.

Sure, maybe there are some achievements you get by exploring, but you get a lot of them just by performing predefined tasks. And I don’t see how the achievement helps with theorycrafting–I’d think you’d just need to do the same thing slightly differently over and over to get quantifiable data.

(Theorycrafting doesn’t mean crafting a theory about the world, as the name might seem to imply. It means figuring out the game mechanics and theory. Minmaxing is a type of theorycrafting. And it’s used a lot in speedrunning.)

Actually it’s a bit more nuanced than that. Achievers basically like points. So achievers would like to collect all the trophies, complete their card collection, get an achievement for killing x trolls, things like that. If you have an achievement list and there’s something which isn’t filled up yet, the achiever would like to get that.

If there was no achievement or trophy for exploring every nook and cranny of the land, the achiever wouldn’t bother.

Explorers on the other hand want to explore everything. Where a unique landmark is, where a grave stone is, the particular shop which sells this particular thing. It doesn’t have to have combat or even any kind of value - for example, if an explorer finds a park with a unique statue of a lore-related character that nobody knows about, it’s GOLD. But the achiever wouldn’t particularly care about it. Whereas if there was an achievement for standing in some random non-descript park which everyone goes through for a minute or something, the explorer wouldn’t care about that either. It’s not interesting, everyone goes through that place and knows about it.

[Nava]

Completist. Mostly explorer*, but whomever came up with achievements ought’a be taken out back and shot, 'cos if there is a little achievement point to be got… it must.

• My minmaxer brother laughed at me for how long it took me the first time through Baldur’s Gate. Then he picked his jaw up from the floor seeing me with a fireball wand at level 5. Great balls of fire!