From a game design perspective, users help to “rebuild” Atlantis by earning the ingame currency ORIs in the minigames. As soon as enough ORIs are available, a new feature in the world is unlocked for everyone – a new room, new avatar items, or a new game.

Besides that, more and more users are sending in their stories and drawings to be included in the library or the museum, respectively.

I hope we can gain more momentum with that user generated content – as always, some users seem to get into it more than others, some of them even use other platforms like YouTube:

As auntie pixelante puts it:

achievement unlocked is a game the goal of which is just the simple accumulation of these arbitrary goals. there are a hundred. you’ll have unlocked at least two before you even start the game, at which point you’ll unlock four more: one for having started the game, one for having reached the game’s first (and only) screen, one for not having moved yet, and one for having unlocked at least one achievement.

…

all the things that satisfy the compulsive behavior publishers assume we have.

Now, as I’m in the process of implementing a MMO-light’ish platform, the topic of having achievements has been raised a couple of times in various discussions between the designer and me already… and I’m kind of undecided whether they should and would play an important role in the platform, or not.

Thinking about it, I observe how strangely fulfilling it seems to be to  just count and compare the numbers of “friends” or “buddies” in Facebook, Xing or other similar platforms, at least for some people…

Is this the true meaning of virtual life – to be friends with as many people as possible (especially if it’s as easy as inviting somebody as friend with a click of the mouse, and no obligation to do anything else afterwards – EVER)?