How I Ruined Camping With Achievements

With only a few exceptions, I have gone camping with my parents and my older cousin every year since I was five. We are by no means "hardcore" campers, but my mom did try to enforce a "no phones" rule for as long as possible. My cousin was the first to routinely break this rule as a teenager, when his hormones kicked in and his hierarchy of needs underwent a small adjustment.

I, of course, eventually became a teenager myself, but I tried to uphold the spirit of camping longer than my cousin did. In fact, it was actually sort of relaxing being entirely separated from the larger world for a few days. I would spend the better part of each camping trip curled up by the fire, enjoying a good book and the sound of the rushing river behind the trees.

Then came 2014.

On January 12, just two months after ruining video games for myself forever, I discovered a website for broken people like myself. It was called TrueAchievements, and it was my personal Xbox achievement spreadsheet on steroids. Here's a sample page:

Not only did it include all the information I'd been tracking on my own (presented in a much more attractive fashion), it also featured achievement guides, discussion forums, and community challenges. One of the site's most novel features--which we'll touch on later--was community-organized "Boosting Sessions", where players would gather at a specific time and help each other obtain specific achievements.

I had known other players collected Xbox achievements, but this was a whole new ball game. Now this was where I belonged.

After getting over the initial flood of offerings TrueAchievements provided, the feature that most interested me was a personal statistic called "Achievement Streaks", the longest stretches of time a player obtained one or more achievement across consecutive days. And, wouldn't you know it, I had racked up a 13-day streak in late 2013 without even realizing it! I eagerly rushed to the leaderboards to see how I stacked up against other users and--

Well.

I knew I was years behind making a dent in the site-wide leaderboards--which would naturally continue to move further from my reach as the top players continued their streaks--but I could still try for a personal best. I decided to set my sights on 100 days. One achievement minimum per day for just over three months. It would be a challenge, but hardly impossible. And once I'd done that, I would go back to my new normal of getting as many achievements as possible, as fast as possible. No point dragging things out when the pool of available Gamerscore was growing with each new game release.

The streak began on February 8 with "Close to the Animals", a fairly simple achievement in the new Zoo Tycoon game for the Xbox One (which, in case you're wondering, pales in comparison to the PC original). From there, I bounced around to numerous titles including Tomb Raider, Lego Batman, Jeopardy, Call of Duty, and Burger King's PocketBike Racer.

(These are all real games, available from Burger King restaurants for $5 each in 2006. None of them are very good, but they are interesting for being--as far as I know--the only discs to contain both the Xbox 360 and original Xbox versions of the same game on them.)

I didn't initially plan out the streak, because I knew I would be unlocking plenty of achievements naturally. Fable Anniversary--an HD remake of 2004's Fable--had just released at the start of the month, and I played it almost nonstop for about a week until I perfected it. That momentum carried me into bingeing several games over the next month, with brief pit stops in other titles.

During this time, I even participated in several boosting sessions for several multiplayer achievements I would have had a bear of a time obtaining organically. Besides just generally being more well-versed in achievement hunting, many of these gamers were from Europe, so I had to battle both poor microphone quality and international accents in addition to already feeling like a novice among pros. These sessions plumped up my Gamerscore and helped take care of some of the ugly black clouds lurking over my completion percentage.

(I would like to take a moment to remind you that this story started with camping, and assure you that we will return there at some point.)

It wasn't until the back half of March that I began actively planning my 100-day streak. Instead of unlocking a dozen or more achievements in a single day by bingeing a new title, I became more methodical in my game choices. I began plotting out which achievements I would get each day, often saving very easy achievements for when I knew I wouldn't have much time for a more labor-intensive alternative. I would make progress towards cumulative achievements and stop just short of completing them, effectively chambering them to fire off when I didn't have any other options that day. I would frequently start progress on achievements after 11 p.m. and aim to complete them at 12:01 a.m. so I could sleep with the day's achievement already taken care of. In some cases, I was planning full weeks in advance.

I reached my goal of a 100-day streak on May 19, in the middle of a two-week run of achievements in Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. As it turned out, the streak really hadn't been that much of a challenge. Sure, I played some clunkers along the way (the only redeeming quality of the tie-in game for Brave is that they managed to get Kelly MacDonald to reprise her role as Merida), but overall it was a fun exercise that helped me clear some of my backlog. Plus, it let me role-play being a master strategist, putting the pieces in place to secure daily achievements well down the line.

So, I figured, why not go for a year?

And with that, my streak continued. I was playing mostly a mix of Xbox One and Xbox 360 games, but I also branched out when I discovered some Windows 8 puzzle games offered easy achievements. Now I was working on three fronts to develop a roadmap that would carry me towards 365 continuous days of achievement popping.

And then came camping.

We never went anywhere far--being in the Pacific Northwest, you only have to drive about 30 minutes in any direction to start finding suitable camping sites. This year, as with most years, we would be heading up Stevens Pass, a winding road littered with small towns and campgrounds. We planned to head up the morning of Thursday, July 17, and return that Sunday. I knew I could pop easy achievements before leaving Thursday and after returning Sunday, so I only had the two days in between to worry about.

There was no way my mom would let me bring my laptop, and even if I could I wouldn't be able to get an internet connection. For the briefest of moments, I considered having someone else log into my account and trigger something I'd already set up, but that wouldn't have sat right with me. Better to fail honestly than succeed unfairly.

So. No Xboxes. No laptop. No cheating. What was left?

So, it turns out that Microsoft has published a small handful of games available on Android devices, meaning as long as I could get a strong enough data signal for even a few minutes a day during my camping trip, I could take a sneaky trip away from my mom, pop a single achievement, and she'd be none the wiser.

But there's a problem with this list. Well, two. The first is fairly obvious: a couple of these titles are listed for platforms that aren't mobile phones--VR and Kindle, for example. The second is that I pulled this list in 2020, so some of these titles wouldn't have been options for me in summer 2014. With that in mind, let's look at what options I actually had:

Alright, now let's take a look at TrueAchievements's estimated completion times for our two contenders.

The choice wasn't hard.

After staying up until after two in the morning playing Payday 2 to get my Thursday achievement, I made sure Wordament was downloaded to my phone and rested up for the trip. My cousin and his girlfriend arrived at our house late that morning, and we were on the road by noon. As we ascended the pass, I kept an eye on my phone's service bars, willing them to stay strong as we neared the campground. Things were fine as we passed through the last small town before our turnoff, but soon the evergreen canopy thickened around us and I saw my data bars shrink to nothing. Cell service, sure, but no data at all.

As we unpacked and settled in, I was of two minds. Part of me was coming to terms with the end of my streak on day 160--leagues ahead of my original goal but less than halfway to a full year. The other part of me was trying frantically to devise some way to still keep the streak alive. Maybe somewhere on one of the trails was a pocket where I could get juuust enough data?

Maybe I was actually enough of a cheater to have a friend log into my account and pop something for me?

Nope.

Somehow, my solution was even worse than that.

It turns out that, despite having been camping annually for well over a decade, we still had yet to figure out the right amount of supplies to bring--things like perishable food, firewood, ice for the coolers. While we would certainly have been able to survive with what we brought, I used it as a way to leverage my dad into making a trip down to the nearest grocery store on Friday.

And again on Saturday.

I sunk a knife deep into both my dad's and my relaxing outdoor time just to drive down a winding gravel road to the nearest sign of civilization, where there was barely enough data service for me to pop a single easy achievement in the deli aisle of a grocery chain before heading back to camp. Even though these trips to town were "only" an hour or so, going from tree-filtered sunlight and river burbles to fluorescent bulbs and contemporary pop completely took me out of the camping mindset. It was a tonal whiplash that I should have expected, but didn't.

Returning to camp should have been the solution, but it was like a switch had flipped in my brain and jammed itself in place. Suddenly camping was no longer a getaway for me. It was a setback, something to endure until I could be back at home, controller in hand.

This was the year that I began mapping out the timeline of the camping trips, thinking about how many hours could be burned playing specific card games, actively looking forward to nightfall so I could go to sleep and fast forward eight hours, putting me that much closer to the return trip. Even once I stopped trying for achievement streaks, I retained this way of thinking, and no matter how much I enjoyed subsequent trips, I would always be aware in the back of my mind of how much longer I'd have to wait until I could go home.

And it all started with playing Wordament in a remote grocery store.

Not only was I breaking my mom's longstanding "no phones" rule, I was doing it in likely the most egregious way possible. I think by this point she knew it was a rule that was on its way out, especially since she herself was becoming more invested in social media, but I wish I could have given up my arbitrary quest to preserve the blissful simplicity of our camping trips just a bit longer.

When we got back home on Sunday, I helped unload the camping equipment, took a much-needed shower, and hopped onto my Xbox 360 to play some Halo with a friend. I popped five achievements no problem and, while still guilty about the way I had to do it, pleased that I had kept my streak alive.

Not long after this, I realized that karma had played me like a fiddle.

This is my overall achievement log surrounding the 2014 camping trip:

Remember how I said I needed to be connected to the internet for achievements to unlock? That's because streaks on TrueAchievements are based on timestamps that are only created when an achievement is unlocked while online. Offline achievements will eventually sync with your account, but they will lack a timestamp and therefore not count towards a streak.

So those two Wordament achievements with "offline" next to them? Those are the ones I popped while camping. And, after all that work, they didn't count towards the streak.

What's more, the achievements unlocking offline has nothing to do with my spotty data connection or anything. It's because the game itself just flat-out doesn't provide timestamps. It's one of just nine games with that quirk.

Note that the only other Android game available at the time, Wordament Snap Attack, is also on the list, so neither option would have worked. And so, according to TrueAchievements, my streak ended on day 160, with my late-night gaming session in the early hours of July 17.

Now, technically, I hadn't failed. I was still gaining at least one achievement every day. I actually continued to do so after I got home, all the way until November 16, 2014, resulting in a second streak of 120 days. In fact, those two streaks remain my longest on the site.

But according to TrueAchievements, the site that had become my new source of approval and motivation in the gaming world, all I had were two streaks of little merit separated by a pair of offline achievements representing the time I prevented myself from enjoying a once-a-year family tradition.

Technically, technically, I went 282 consecutive days, but the site doesn't reflect that. I earned 1,370 achievements for a total of 30,245 Gamerscore. But, as I mentioned in my last post, Gamerscore has no inherent value.

I ruined camping for nothing.