https://usv.edu/max-achievement-scholarship
So my girlfriend sends me this link... It's a college. Silicon Valley College... offering a $15000 scholarship... for... video game achievements.
So I'm looking through this list thinking wow this must be really hard to accomplish or something, but in actuality I already qualify for quite a few of these. Not that I'm looking for a college scholarship or anything it's just wild that this is even a thing.
Then again I guess there are plenty of ways to cheat in school just generically, with AI being the ultimate final boss of cheating.
If I still played WOW I might actually qualify for this one, but I gave up on WOW because the time commitment is absurd and casual play is just not my thing. I guess you could say I get hooked on the juice quite quickly (which is how these games are meticulously designed to begin with).
I guess the column that cracks me up the most is the "Educational Rationale". Here's why we should give you money for playing a video game: "Long-term systems engagement." In my mind this is like calling the guy that works at subway a Sandwich Artist, or all the other ridiculously trumped up titles in the corporate workplace.
In reality the educational rational for all MMORPGs is that they are a meticulously mind-numbing grind. Which is kind of funny because I suppose that's exactly what academia and the workforce want with a student/employee.
I don't have a console but I do have Steam and my girlfriend owns a Switch. I do find it humorous that some of these challenges in my mind boil down to just "did you beat the game?" Like in any Zelda game I would always do all the puzzles just by default. No skips!
I guess I wouldn't want to spoil it because even though I do have 100% of the achievements on 5 games on Steam three of those games are also listed below in their own separate category.
Rogue-type games are considered to be one of the hardest possible single player challenges. In my opinion Roguelite games are superior to Roguelike games, and often Roguelite is referred to as Roguelike because it's just easier to boil it down to a single category. The difference between the two is that in a roguelike game when you die you lose everything and have to start over from ground zero. In a Roguelite game you can slowly grind out permanent upgrades to your account that carry over to the rest of the games you play. This sense of RPG progression makes them superior in my opinion.
In any case I was surprised by this category because I just completed Dead Cells on Hell difficulty (5 stem cells) like two days ago. Pretty random. I've also played Enter the Gungeon a lot and could easily grind it a tiny bit more to 100% it out. Was a bit surprised to see these games even on the list but they did go viral on Twitch at one point over half a decade ago.
I've never played Dark Souls before and that's honestly kind of weird because they get talked about often and I'm always up for a challenge. Of course I have smashed Hollow Knight and Silksong and made multiple posts about them in the past. In fact just last May I went well beyond 112% completion by beating the Pantheon of Hallownest 4 times on all 4 handicap bindings. Then I was able to crank out a flawless radiant victory against Absolute Radiance... which honestly felt like an impossible task a couple of years back when I was playing it for the first time. This is considered by many the most difficult task you can accomplish in a single player vanilla game (one without mods that make it even harder).
Silksong isn't on here which is a shame because all the bad reviews were "this game is too hard".
They'd almost certainly accept it as a custom submission (perhaps even giving someone a higher chance of getting the scholarship with the correct rationale).
I also played Cuphead which is only "Mastery Tier" because it is indeed a lot easier to achieve.
It's such an old game that's considered dead by many.
I do indeed have all of those.
I'm missing 4 of the speedrun achievements but I could crank those out pretty easily if I was motivated. I'm sure there are even a bunch of blueprints I could copy online that would make it trivially easy.
With the requirement being "unlock all milestones"... which is essentially "beat the game" iirc.
I've also been thinking about playing XCOM because the internets says it's a good turn based game.
Gotta stop that alien invasion.
I've played a lot of Minecraft but I know for a fact I don't have all the cheevos.
I was grinding some of them out at one point let's see how many I have left...
The ones I have left to do look pretty easy as well. But to be honest the achievements on Minecraft are pretty dumb for the most part and not really interesting at all. In fact I play the bedrock version and it looks like "achievements" and "advancements" are completely different. Bedrock doesn't even have advancements as far as I know.
I would argue that my Redstone builds are way more interesting than any of that. The big one being a mass production potion factory that creates a chest-full of potions after 10 minutes with the click of a button. Redstone is very akin to low level assembly programming so that would be a very easy one to justify for a computer science major.
I also have this one... lol.
It's just a massive grind I would say, hardly any skill.
What a throwback.
I had to make sure that I have all the achievements there as well.
It's a hard game but it gets pretty stupid and annoying at the end.
Geometry Dash is one of the few games on this list that I've played but don't qualify for. This is a tough game as 
Looking back at everything it appears as though it would be pretty easy for me to apply for around ten of these categories. Of course I think you're supposed to pick one and roll with it for the written part of the application. Surely I would pick a Factory game like Factorio or Satisfactory because those are the most logistics-driven games that have a lot of real world relevance. Bottlenecks, bug-fixing, sustainability, circuits, mutual-exclusion, production, just-in-time models, yada yada yada. Easy win.
It's a shame that college is such a scam these days. Getting a degree is way overpriced and getting a job with that degree seems to be more and more complained about. A part of me hopes that AI-driven educational systems can collapse the academic university complex altogether, but I suppose that's another story.
