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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8628702" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I would personally refer to what you call "achievement" here as "prestige." An achievement is...something achieved, even if it goes unnoticed by others. Prestige by its very nature requires recognition from other people. It's impossible to be prestigious and unknown but it is quite possible to achieve something and have no one know about it.Consider, for example, that Ramanujan made several achievements in mathematics while he was still completely unknown. Or that there are achievements of ancient peoples which got no recognition (hence, prestige) until they were unearthed by archaeology in modern times. Prestige is generally one of the reasons a person might desire to achieve things, as wishing to be high in the estimation of others is a pretty natural motivation, but it's far from the only reason. Like that one mathematician, Perelman, who turned down the Millennium Prize money for proving the Poincaré conjecture. He pretty clearly didn't do the proof purely for recognition, as he is an intensely private man who doesn't do many interviews and mostly stays out of the public eye, but that does not lessen his achievement at having proved a thing considered difficult and worthy of knowing.So, ultimately, I stand by my chosen terms. Achievement is the action of surpassing a worthy challenge. Prestige is the (often desirable) result of being recognized for surpassing a worthy challenge. Prestige is a purely player-side motive which might drive one to play a Score-and-Achievement game, because such games are extremely amenable to having others understand quickly and effectively the magnitude and difficulty of any given achievement one makes. "I took down the Tarrasque" has meaning because "the Tarrasque" requires no additional context outside of knowing how the rules work and what specific ones it uses (in other words, its place in the Score space). There is no need to explain complex individual context, nor to work through the details of a situation with sufficient fidelity such that the reasoning behind the choices is revealed. This means the prestige of being able to lay claim to this Achievement is very easily reached. You see similar things with stuff like "I survived the Tomb of Annihilation," or in the MMO space, stuff like the shirt I got from a friend that says "I Beat Ravana." (I didn't actually beat Ravana myself; friend is a tech support employee at Square-Enix and had some company swag to give away to friends. It's a delightfully comfortable shirt.) These things have meaning because the system is understood and requires no extra context, so long as fair play is assumed.Perhaps it is important here to note that I am going for a taxonomy of "what is the game for" rather than "why do players choose to play it." If one is building a player motivation model, then yes, Prestige will be strongly associated with GNS "Gamist"/Score-and-Achievement games. I would contrast this against (if I may use a word slightly outside its usual context) "Understanding," "Epiphany," or "Enlightenment," where the player goal is to have as many moments as possible of suddenly SEEING the solution to a puzzle or quandary, which meshes with both Gamism/Score-and-Achievement (discovering a brilliant strategy or subverting an expected outcome in a clever way) and with "process" Sim (a particularly deft execution of naturalistic reasoning in pursuit of some end, or a clever explanation of a previously confusing or seemingly-ungrounded situation or entity). Self-Realization, by contrast, would be a player motivation in "Narrativist"/Values-and-Issues play, because the practice of that play requires putting values to the test, which can lead to surprises in what one is in fact willing or unwilling to do in pursuit of those ends. (See above for the example of the dwarf character who challenged his mother's criticisms, and the player speculating about what would have happened if their approach had failed instead of succeeding.)I think I may have missed the post where you articulated your five (now six?) player motives, so I apologize if I am simply regurgitating your own points.</blockquote>

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