Bragging Rights

There are many many different reasons people play video games. However, it can be said that on average there are four big reasons a person decides to play a game:

1. To be entertained by the gameplay. To feel a sense of “fun” or enjoyment from playing the game.

2. To achieve a sense of accomplishment/satisfaction upon completion of the game. This can be achieved even is the game does not have a set “end” and sometimes even if the player does not finish the game, as games can have several breaks that can give this feeling.

3. To experience a story or characters. This is another different source of entertainment. The story or characters do not have to be well crafted; they merely have to appeal to that particular player’s sensibilities.

4. Bragging Rights.

This last motivation is my topic of discussion for this paper. There is one major motivation I didn’t mention which would be “to be challenged” but for the sake of simplicity in this paper, “to be challenged” will be lumped together with accomplishment even though it is a different sort of accomplishment. Although, as you will see, “to be challenged” is also closely related to bragging rights, although here I am referring more to challenge for challenge’s sake.

Let’s start with an anecdote. I was recently playing Super Smash Brothers Brawl and looked up an FAQ on beating a special mode called 100-man brawl using every character in the game. This is one of the challenges in the game and doing these challenges gives you a reward like a trophy or new stage or what have you. The game gives you these golden hammer items that can be used to automatically complete a challenge that the player doesn’t want to do or might be too hard. I had used one on this particular challenge because I found it annoying and time consuming. The FAQ had this to say about this particular challenge, “Now the last one is a bit of a challenge, not really that hard if you know what you're doing. But it's still very time consuming and some players use one of their golden hammers on it. Don't, you don't need to use one on that, you don't need to use it on anything.” This made me think. Why would you not use any of the golden hammers on anything? You don’t unlock anything special for not using them. Why would anyone want to go through extra aggravation and spend a bunch of extra time doing all the challenges that they don’t actually enjoy doing when they have an item that is specifically there to be used to avoid this?

This is what I refer to as “bragging rights”. The force that drives players to take a route in a game that gives the same result but uses a much harder path. The thing that drives players to spend hours and hours on a game, only to receive a large number followed by their initials. Bragging rights is the motivation for players to be able to say things like, “I have the highest score in Pac-man,” or “I beat Metal Gear 2 using only the knife,” or “I beat Hoshigami.”

This is a long standing tradition in video games. In the early days of the arcade many games had no ending; they were designed to get increasingly harder with no story to progress through due to technological limitations and in an effort to get the player to use more quarters. As a method of motivating these players to keep playing beyond the simple enjoyment of the game, these games had charts that would show the high scores. The better the player did, the higher the score. It became a sort of competition among arcade goers; the person with the highest score could brag that they were better than anyone else at that game. Nowadays, this tradition is still alive. However, there are very few games whose sole motivation is a score. In fact, many games on the market don’t even have a scoring system at all. Players achieve bragging rights through other methods however, often artificially created by the player. It can be something like playing through a game on hard mode to not losing any lives to beating all the challenges yourself, without using a golden hammer to finish one for you. Many games and companies are offering new ways to relive this old tradition, like adding in more difficult modes of play in the game or like Microsoft creating a “gamerscore” for all Xbox 360 games.

This practice raises two questions. Are other players really impressed by the accomplishments of one person in playing a game? Especially now where the games and the market are so different. Can a player really brag to others about his achievement and receive praise or even not end up looking like a loser/braggart? I think that this is much harder to do now and that most players who challenge themselves in this way are really looking for a different kind of end result with their bragging rights. These players feel a greater sense of achievement at merely having accomplished such a large feat worthy of bragging about. In a way they want to be able to brag to themselves to make themselves feel skilled or proud for their achievements.

The other question is: At what point does the aggravation, time, effort, and difficulty out weigh the right to brag? This is really dependent on what the goal is and who the player is. Many players find it too much of a hassle merely to play through a game on a higher difficulty level. They see no reason for it. Yet, it also depends on the developer and how they handled the challenging task, because there is a major difference between and enjoyably challenging and aggravatingly hard. In the end it’s something that has to be determined by the player. And maybe the players friends if they are competitive enough or at least interested enough to react to the achievement.