They are out there—perhaps in greater numbers than you realize. Achievement Whores. People who are utterly addicted to earning Xbox 360 Gamerscore points. This affliction has various stages from buying cheap DLC to earn a few easy points to playing through mind numbing games designed for six year olds just to boost your score.

Whores come in all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds. Sure, some are teenage gaming addicts but that only tells the obvious part of this tale. Adults—full blown grown men and women: lawyers, teachers, doctors, and game journalists have succumbed to this phenomenon and that’s why we’re here today--to discuss the how’s and the why’s…to find out what makes a person an Achievement Whore and what we can do, as a society, to help them.

First, let’s meet our panel.

My name is Brandon Cackowski-Schnell, known to GameShark readers far and wide as Mr. Binky. My tag is Mister Binky (original, I know) and I'm currently sitting just north of 35k with a score of 35,943.

As for gaming history, well, I started off pretty casually with an occasional Sierra adventure game as a kid. I really didn't start gaming until the late 90's though, when I bought my first PC and dove into MechWarrior and Tomb Raider and Wing Commander with gleeful abandon. I played PC games for a long time (Baldur's Gate 2: Best. Game. Ever.) but eventually tired of the driver updating and hardware conflicts that were so common to PC gaming. It was a combination of a GameCube, a finished basement and a 50 inch TV that turned me down the dark path of consoles in 2001 and I never turned back.

Knights of the Old Republic is what got me playing on the Xbox and that platform, and very quickly became my main platform, not counting handheld gaming. I bought a 360 at launch, well, a month after launch once they worked out the supply problems. At the time I bought it, I really didn't care about achievments. It wasn't until Petey started racking up the points in early 2007 that I caught the bug, but it was BioShock, in August of 2007 that did it for me. Once I saw that with careful planning, a laptop riding shotgun and lots of printed out lists, a full thousand could be yours, I was hooked. Ironically enough, I don't have a full thousand points for BioShock, excuse me, a full 1100 points, but that's another story.

My name is Matt and I'm an achievement whore. My tag is Petey247, part of a nick I took on when I was a younger man, and a nice 247 added to the end for a bit of zest. My score is currently sitting at little over 131,507 and a total number of achievements 4501 as I pound out the last few achievements in Overlord. I game on a 42" LCD and a 22" LCD (2 Xboxes). The 22" is when my wife wants to watch TV, which is one of those compromises that one makes to keep the peace.

A little history about myself. I started in video games playing hangman on an unidentified computer at Control Data Institute back in the late 70s when I was but a wee lad. This was quickly followed by an Atari 2600 and an Intellivision. I upgraded along the way to an Atari 7200 and then a NES. Around this time I started into PC gaming and continued until I graduated high school. I was into PC gaming for a while (UT 99 was my fave) with a timely break to grab a Super NES. Taking a break to get married and have a few kids, I found myself picking up a PS2 a few months after launch while my wife was out of town. I continued to split my gaming time between the PC (Shooters) and PS2 (Platformers and RPGs) until I got my 360.

I got into 360 gaming because it was already out and my brother had switched over from his PS2. Between the low availability of the PS3 at the time, and supposedly being able to play with my brother across the Internet with ease, I picked up my 360 in December of 2006. It helped that a few of the others in the office had a 360 and they enjoyed it. At the time, my brother's score was about 23k and that was the incentive I needed to start racking up points.

My name is also Matt, known to the few on my friends list as ScaryClown98. And no, I am not eleven years old. I have used ScaryClown as a handle for years and when it is already taken I end up adding 98 to the end of it because I assume there aren't 97 other ScaryClowns out there. I am the baby achievement whore of this group with a measly 27k score (for now ... watch out Mister Binky).

My gaming started at the tender age of five with a TI-99, playing Parsec and Munch Man (Pac Man clone). I moved from there to the Commodore 64 (favorite game was Archon) before moving into the world of the IBM PC where I played just about every Sierra adventure game they made with the exception of Mixed-Up Mother Goose. Then, pretty much like the rest of the gaming world at the time, I got caught up in Doom and its prodigy for a while. I pretty much stayed on the PC playing shooters and RPGs until around summer of 2008 where I finally decided that between kids and work I didn't have time to mess with drivers or upgrading my machine anymore.

That was when the era of the 360 started for me. For months I listened to conversations with friends about the 360 which whetted my appetite considerably. The only holdout was that I was scared that I would get too into the achievements and not be able to play the games the way I wanted. I gave in and bought the 360 with my first game being Assassin's Creed, which was a very doable 1000 points. Oops. Once I started off with a 100% completion there was no going back.