Games are virtual. When you turn on the console, a world appears; when you turn it off, no trace remains. Except for the achievements you earned -- which fortify your Gamerscore and self-esteem, blip by blip. The Underachiever tracks the productivity of one gamer playing to catch up to his peers. What do games feel like when they're used for work?



Another Cutup

This idea's been floating around that games are like art. On less stressful days, games are like a memory, or a machine, or a musical instrument. On happy days, games feel like all of these things.

And let's not forget the equally embattled idea that games are a trifle. Literally, that games are a waste, a bottle you keep at your side to fill up empty times, but which doesn't fulfill you. Games on the iPhone are a lot like this, and I have been playing them constantly this summer in Berlin, a city that has a lot of time to spare.


The App Store has real games, too -- like Chaos Rings, an epic Square Enix role-playing game; or Space Invaders Infinity Gene, a bullet-hell shmup; or Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution. But I'm even more drawn to what you might call its false games, the ones reluctant gamers like to say "hardly match the DS or PSP in terms of quality," the ones that exist to fill up time. They are often also the ones that are hard to take seriously -- with titles like Magnetic Shaving Derby, Angry Birds, Mr. Space!!, and Fruit Ninja.

Fruit Ninja is ostensibly a game about slicing fruit. Pears and apples and strawberries fly up from the bottom of the screen, and you cut them in half with your finger. You play to see how much fruit you can cut before you either a) let too many drop untouched, or b) cut a bomb (!) by accident. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Except Fruit Ninja isn't quite that simple. Unlike the likes of Doodle Jump (where you tilt the little guy from platform to platform) or Angry Birds (where you flick projectiles and let gravity do the rest), Fruit Ninja feels uncannily like an action game. This was when I realized I was embarrassed to play the game outside. A successful game of Fruit Ninja calls for some reflexes and concentration -- like sword-fighting in a modern Prince of Persia game... or, at worst, something like that lightsaber game on the Wii.

Yet another idea says that games take skill, that gaming is a talent, and that these redeem the activity. The difference between 100, 200, and 300 points in Fruit Ninja calls much more on finger-flicking prowess than luck. And yet, it's impossible to approach a game about slicing peaches and pineapples seriously.


Not even the more difficult achievements, which you get for cutting up various combinations and numbers of fruit, can change this. It's partly a matter of economy. With Apple's Game Center yet to unify the App Store library, Fruit Ninja has to rely on OpenFeint to issue and track achievements. But OpenFeint's just an accessory, like an iPhone sleeve, competing with similar networks like Crystal, Plus+, and AGON Online. I'm an overachiever on OpenFeint; my score is 3,859, at least three times more than every friend but one. But these numbers are inflated and meaningless.

And let's not forget the whole slicing-oranges-and-bananas thing. Fruit Ninja is a trifle no matter how you cut it.

A lot of people think that art and other things you consume must be good for you, like a form of nutrition. So people want to hear that games can enlighten and inspire them, or at least mitigate depression and improve hand-eye coordination. And gamers ultimately want deep experiences from their games.

Fruit Ninja is engineered for pure pleasure. It's no World of Warcraft, but hearing the sharp thwack of a freshly cleaved coconut and seeing its white innards splash realistically (you assume) across the image of Hokusai's The Great Wave makes the world around you seem much less interesting. Fruit Ninja is thoroughly lush, from the plumes of smoke that follow the Flame Blade, to the unsettling insides of a passion fruit. It's pointless and pretty at all angles, like a jewel.


So I ate up its achievements, even though they live in a vacuum, and unlocked every background and blade. Rewards like 80: Fruit Rampage (for reaching 5,000 fruit "killed") and 60: Lucky Ninja (for getting six critical hits in a round) felt silly, but no less real than the achievements that Fallout 3 doles out. And I actually gasped when the fruit barrage died down briefly and the exotic dragon fruit flew out.

The dragon fruit was Akuma in an early Street Fighter game, the gaming equivalent of a unicorn sighting -- a rarity by design. A new texture wrapped around a unique shape that made for a special target, which I immediately cut open to get the 40: Year of the Dragon achievement. It's by the nature of gaming that I wanted to preserve this fruit, but instead had to hack it to pieces.

The achievement is the only palpable remnant of the fruit. But it's less a hunting trophy than a sign of my attraction to the game. I know the dragon fruit is still buried in the game's code; I know the one I destroyed was just a clone. The dragon fruit is no less present now than it ever was -- it's just hidden deep. In this sense, the most elusive achievements are a way of marking your passage to the outer limits of a game. They let you neatly consummate your place on immaterial grounds.

How else can you see a game's boundaries without unraveling its code? Far from diverting us from real gameplay, I'd like to think that achievements get us closer to understanding our weird relationships with games. That they find depth in a bauble like Fruit Ninja says, I hope, more about gaming than about me!

Achievements earned: 6
Points gained: 300



Ryan Kuo is an editor at Kill Screen Magazine, and a freelance writer and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. And please don't laugh at his Gamerscore -- he's working on it.