I spent the other night getting shot in the foot in a subway station.

I should probably clarify, lest you think I have a fetish for podiatrists. This wasn’t a real shooting, nor was it a real subway station; it was all done in Starbreeze’s comic book based shooter, The Darkness. Despite my actions, LThe Darkness is not about a man who has an insane hatred of feet, it’s about a mob hitman who becomes possessed with an ancient evil force. For the record, the evil force doesn’t hate feet either. The reason I was standing around getting shot in the foot repeatedly was so that I could obtain the “Hard to Kill” achievement.

Welcome, my friends, to the wonderful world of boosting.

Boosting is a gaming subculture that has grown up around the Microsoft 360’s Achievements system. The concept is a simple one. Playing games allows you to obtain Achievements. These Achievements have a point value. These points go to your Gamerscore. Having a higher Gamerscore than the next guy makes you a better person, a paragon of not only gaming, but honestly, humanity in general. It also prevents tooth decay and bedbugs and gives your coat a nice, glossy sheen.

Boosting requires a strange combination of gaming skill, patience, obsessive compulsive disorder and the ability to play some staggeringly awful games. Oh sure, we’ve all gotten booed off stage when playing Guitar Hero on Easy to obtain the “Long Road Ahead” Achievement, but these are people who willingly play “Meet the Robinsons” and are not getting paid to review it, and are not eight-years old. Clearly they exist in their own world.

And what a world it is. It’s a world where you may spend an evening standing around getting chainsawed for four hours while your co-booster works on his Gears of War “It’s A Massacre” achievement only to spend the next night chainsawing him for four hours. It’s a world where you keep separate login profiles for playing around with games lest an uncompleted game shows up on your Gamertag. It’s a world where you convince yourself that your high level Argonian assassin really would join the Fighter’s Guild in Oblivion and help the innocents you’ve spent the past 100 hours indiscriminately killing so that you can finally close out the game. It’s a world where you then curse your tortured existence when an expansion pack is released and your previously closed out game ain’t so closed out any more. I speak from experience on that one.

And what does all this hard work get you? Usually nothing but the pride of having your Gamerscore soar into the stratosphere and the knowledge that your 360 isn’t talking smack about you on its 360voice.com blog. Gamerscore leagues have popped up where these likeminded individuals join teams to see which team can boost their cumulative scores the most within a set amount of time, however they don’t offer anything tangible for your efforts either, except an understanding that there are those out there as perverted as you are.

Microsoft has embraced the competitive nature of boosting and now has a Gamerscore rewards program that offers various boosting challenges however they’re mostly used as an excuse to shill Microsoft games, and oddly enough, Old Spice deodorant. Past challenges rewarded boosters with a copy of Fusion Frenzy 2 which is akin to asking someone to run a marathon and then smacking them with a live badger as they cross the finish line. Ironically enough, most that won the game promptly turned around and boosted with it, further cementing their abusive relationship with the all powerful Lords of Redmond.

So how do you recognize these strange individuals out in the wild? The typical booster has a fair amount of free time and disposable income. They may have children to act as a cover when they’re buying “Open Season” and “Surf’s Up”. They’re typically recognized by the circles under their eyes from nights of boosting multiplayer and they congregate around the bargain bins at your local game retailers looking to score an easy 1000 points for 20 bucks. Inquiries about why they would play Earth Defense Force on every difficulty level, or why they would play Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer at all, are answered with a shrug and a one word answer: “Boosting”. It’s an awkward moment, as both of you acknowledge that the person in front of you is seriously unhinged and desperately needs help. I had an uncle who once confided in me that he no longer beat his children because most nights he was too drunk to hit them. It’s a similar feeling.