What Can “Left 4 Dead” Teach Us About The Social Web?

Whether it’s Half Life, Team Fortress 2, Portal, or, most recently, Left 4 Dead, Valve has an attention to detail that is unsurpassed among game developers. If it wasn’t for their commitment to opening up their development process, such as through their brilliantly-conceived in-game developer commentary, I’d have no recourse but to conclude that these games were delivered on high from His Noodley Goodness.

Thankfully, their efforts have not gone unnoticed, given their commercial success as well as strong critical acclaim from game journalists and bloggers alike. Since the release of Left 4 Dead in November 2008, there’s been an steady stream of articles about the subtle touches that made for a such a unique gameplay experience. One particularly awesome piece by John Brownlee details how the 5 minute intro video communicates all of the important gameplay dynamics without the player even noticing. Brilliant.

Reading this article got me thinking about what good ideas more conventional software developers could absorb from Valve. What I found particularly intriguing was L4D’s achievement system as a way to explore its potential in the context of the social web.

Mind you, achievement systems are not particularly novel. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example is XBox Live, wherein players unlock achievements by meeting conditions in a particular game, thereby earning trophy icons and Gamerscore points. These accomplishments are usually along the lines of “complete the game on hard difficulty” or “score 100,000 points”. Valve’s implementation (viz Steam) in particular, though, is the first to really use achievements effectively.

In particular, I’ve identified 4 primary uses of the achievement framework: to be Instructive, to be Prescriptive, to be Demarcative, and to act as Incentive. For each of these, I’ll explore a canonical example from the Left 4 Dead achievements, and tie it all together with microformats. Yes, microformats. Excited yet? Just so you know, there’s an achievement to earn by getting to the end of this article.

Left 4 Uses of Achievements

Instructive

All FPS’s are pretty much the same on the surface:
W-A-S-D, Mouse to look and aim, Click to shoot, R to reload, Numbers for weapons, Space to jump.
Play one and you’ve played them all.

This may not be a bad thing in itself, but it does present some design issues. For instance, how do you tell players about something new? No one reads instruction manuals, complex controller maps on loading screen are obnoxious, and in-game tutorials are really awkward in a story’s context (“Wow, an upgrade! Now I can press B to fire missiles!”)

One such hidden ability is that you can instantly kill an infected by sneaking up and melee-attacking them from behind. As you might expect, melee-ing an enemy from behind isn’t a very standard idiom. Not like a Head Shot, at least. So how did I learn to do that? Well, there just so happens to be an accomplishment called “Spinal Tap”, which describes this exact situation.

As obscure as this might seem, buried in an achievements list and whatnot, according to Valve’s stat tracking at the time of this writing, over 60% of users have discovered this on their own, perhaps many of them because of this being an accomplishment.

Achievements like “Spinal Tap” promote exploration by creating an invitation for users to try new things. By learning just this one new thing, a user will be more compelled to step out of their common habits to discover something new for themselves.

Prescriptive

What separates Left 4 Dead from pretty much any other multiplayer game is the intense focus on small-group cooperation. Valve took a huge risk with this too: if it hadn’t nailed that game dynamic, the whole game would have failed. As the central design philosophy for the game, everything comes back to cooperation in Left 4 Dead. Pull a Leeroy Jenkins and fight the horde on your own, and don’t be surprised when a hunter starts feasting on your innards.

So consider another achievement in Left 4 Dead:

When you’ven been rattled by zombies to the point of near-collapse, it’s difficult to even consider healing someone else before you. However, achievements such as “Dead Giveaway” exists to prescribe such selfless actions in order to reward cooperation and cohesion within the group. Subtle rewards like this stress the importance of teamwork and empathy—just as Valve had in mind.

Demarcative

A core facet of our human nature is the importance of understanding one’s place in the world. For platformer and adventure games, like Super Mario World, the world map provides a sense of the vastness of the game, and your progress through it. RPGs use highly-developed plot in conjunction with leveling systems to contrast how far you’ve come since the beginning of the game. Puzzle games taunt you with high-scores.

Left 4 Dead, if you didn’t have achievements, wouldn’t have a strong sense of place on its own. You could spend hundreds of hours blasting through each campaign, and be right back where you started.

Of course, this isn’t the case.

A strong cast of player achievements serve as a permanent record of where your time has gone, and how far your accomplishments reach. You get an achievement for playing through any of the campaigns once, like “Toll Collector” for completing the Death Toll campaign. You get one for beating them on expert too. Even though you spent hours needlessly earning each of them, when you certainly had better things to be doing, at least you have nothing to show for it.

Incentive

One thing is for sure, given fads and trends that pop in and out of existence: people love to collect shit.

The whole concept of an achievements system is based upon this core premise. Present a player with an empty trophy case, and they’ll spend hours upon hours scouring the game world to fill it up. A game might only last a few hours, but the meta-game is, or can be, eternal.

Want to earn all of the achievements in Left 4 Dead? You’ll have to kill 53,595 infected first. To put that in perspective, I average a couple hundred on a normal campaign, each of which takes about an hour. For the average player, this accomplishment will might take 100 hours to complete. What’s amazing is that about 3% players have done it. That’s some dedication.

Left 4 Relevance?

So to recap, here’s what Valve’s achievement system does:

• It encourages players more likely to explore and discover (“Spinal Tap”)
• It instructs players on the right way to do things (“Dead Giveaway”)
• It provides players a sense of place and accomplishment (“Toll Collector”)
• It challenges players to invest more time in the game (“Zombie Genocidest”)

This is exactly what you want users to be doing. Not only is are achievements effective, but there’s very little technical overhead at all. So long as some real time is put into thinking about how you want to encourage users, the only other thing you need are some delicious icons and witty titles. For a fantastic write-up about using these in a web context, check out the Yahoo! Reputation Design Pattern Library.

Web 4.0 Achievements

Putting things into context, imagine if popular sites implemented their own achievement system:

microformats 4 the win

Just Blue Sky Solutioneering™ here, but a portable achievement network like XBox Live or Steam on the web would be pretty sweet. Call it a spiritual successor to those vBulliten-era forum rankings and titles.

To help you get started, here’s a first conceptualization of a microformat spec that I’ll be pursuing in the near future. For now, let’s just call it hAchievement:

<div id="blogdor" class="achievement">
  <img src="images/trophy.png" class="icon" width="60" height="60"/>
  <h1 class="title">Blogdor, the Wordenator!</h1>
  <p class="description">You read this blog post. Gratz!</p>
</div>