Accomplishments / Trophies In Emulators

[multiplex]

I don՚t quite see the point of achievements, but I don՚t think it՚s technically infeasible at all.
A lot of achievements would map about 1:1 to available gameshark codes, and be approximately as computationally taxing to check at run-time, and emulators seem to deal with that just fine.
To take a random game, CODE
http://www.gamegenie.com/cheats/gamegenie/snes/smetroid.html

With those you can easily make achievements for all the inventory, finishing in X time, and mapping out different areas. The only thing you՚re missing is a memory address for 'is now playing the end scene', for the finish in X time bit.

 

[Hollenderster]

The point of that flash example was to show that there is a sensible amount of achievements that can be put into a game as an add-on before it becomes ridiculous. Accomplishments are a great way to further motivate the player and to increase replay value. They shouldn't become the main point of the game, especially if they are just tacked onto an already existing game.
For a public achievement system to work, you have to make sure that the individual achievements are feeling like they are worth something. This includes not handing out achievements for every single item gained or point being made. Make the player really work for it and make sure he can not simply use a hex editor to gain an achievement.
If you allow user-submitted achievement config-files, you have to validate each file to keep the value of the "gamerscore" high. In other words: You can't have everybody printing his own money if you don't want a runaway inflation on your currency. Like DasFool already mentioned, one way to do this is to allow only a certain amount of achievement points per config-file. But this only regulates the quantity, not the quality of the achievements, i.e. how easy they are to achieve in the game and how hard they are to hack.
A possible way to detect if an achievement has been gained through hacking would be to check if the achievement is feasible at the current point in the game. For example, an achievement "You have gained item A" should only be possible if the player already has the key to the locked room item A is in and has played for at least X minutes. Feel free to add more constrains if necessary. On the downside, these constrains make the config-file more complex and require much playtesting to make sure that they work under every circumstance.
To make sure that the config-files are up to a certain standard, you could set up a server where config-files could be put up for review by other gamers in a sort of beta status. Only if enough players have found the file to be adequate, it goes public and starts to generate official "gamerscore".

 

[Mqark]

So if this IS to happen, what do you guys think would be a necessary framework for it to work well?

Would you impose a maximum1000 panda point rule like xbox live where you could attribute all 1000 points to one achievement – for example “finished the game” would be the quickest easiest one, but would make a it a bit of a mockery as you could build up a huge “Gamerscore” by using multiple continues.
Or, would you say that you could only ever get 100 panda points for finishing a game.

You’d of course need to consider rewarding people for not using continues or saves by allocating points for fair play and hardcode playing.

To make it worth anything you’d have to be quite clever and this is where Microsoft really made a difference with xbox live and the 360 in the way people play games and the system that policed it.

The whole point would be to cash in on the Gamerscore system and Sony obviously thought it was a good idea to warrant shoehorning it retroactively into their system and games.

The only thing I’d like to say is that while I love Gamerscores – this has very much been a “Mii too” generation in the console wars with ideas being copied between the 3 big boys. Avatars and Achievements and micro transactions all being the key factors being copied. Retrofitting network play into emulators was an innovation to allow 2 player games to be played over the internet was really quite clever. This idea would be neat, but needs a lot of planning to make a framework that actually turns it into something useful and successful and not just a novelty.

 

[Yamara]

Would you impose a maximum1000 panda point rule like xbox live where you could attribute all 1000 points to one achievement – for example “finished the game” would be the quickest easiest one, but would make a it a bit of a mockery as you could build up a huge “Gamerscore” by using multiple continues.
Or, would you say that you could only ever get 100 panda points for finishing a game.
[...]
You’d of course need to consider rewarding people for not using continues or saves by allocating points for fair play and hardcode playing.
I would say you can only gain each achievement once, and have a max amount of achievement points per game (perhaps even per achievement). Some games have multiple achievements for slightly different goals (beating on easy vs beating on hard). That seems a better way to handle it. You could perhaps extend this to "beating the game with saves" and "beating the game with no deaths". Rather than prevent cheating, you could have "beating the game with cheats". I think if you incorporate the fact that people may save state or other things into the accomplishments, you might have less people trying to subvert the score by "cheating".

Also, I think some of the more interesting achievements are not just Fork Finder (I got a fork) so much as Silver Thief (collected all the silverware in the game), or maybe something like Koopa Maniac (killed 40 koopas by stomping); things that require peeking into dark corners or taking risks to get the goal done. It's good to have a wide range of achievements so everyone from the casual gamer to the neurotic completionist have something to do. However, I suspect this might be more complicated to track and would require a very robust system. Starting out with something simple that's already researched (as someone pointed out with gameshark codes or such) could lead to enough impetus for others to help with more complex achievements.