By on 8 May, 2012 at 11:00 AM
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What Do Trophies Actually Achieve?

What Do Trophies Actually Achieve?

In the good old days, before glittery vampires and Modern Warfare there were no Trophies or Achievements and by that definition there was no Caveshen. Just kidding but seriously, he’s a whore for Achievements. And that’s just the thing, before these perfunctory token rewards came along, we played games for the fun of it and the bragging rights came in being able to tell your friend that you flew through this and that level with minimal fuss. You felt satisfaction when you finished a game or when you beat it on hard difficulty.

That still exists today and sure, a lot of us still play for the fun of it but why are some people so obsessed with Trophies and Achievements? I like to call them Trophy mongers and Achievement whores. Sure, Achievements build up your Gamerscore but does it actually mean anything unless you need to compensate for a ludicrously small penis? Kidding, please don’t stab me.

Maybe games are too easy in general and the only way to actually draw any challenge out of the experience is to attempt these arbitrary tasks? Boy, there sure are a lot of rhetorical questions here. I can understand trying to get all the Achievements/Trophies in a game so as to prolong the experience but when did we start needing to go out of our way to accumulate more Achievements/Trophies. To cite an example, our resident oddball, Caveshen is obsessed with Achievements to the point where he played the Green Lantern licensed game for them. I personally don’t care much for these things but he takes his Gamerscore very seriously and that’s something he’s passionate about, fair enough.

My beef is whether this is a fad we’re going through or whether the habit of going out of your way to get every single Trophy/ Achievement in a game is here to stay and whether it is worth the effort because after all, what are you really achieving?

All thanks go to Yashaar Mall for once again providing this week’s Question of the Week.

 

Question Of The Week is your chance to get involved. Experience the opinions and thoughts of eGamer readers and staff members. Also, if you have a good Question-Suggestion, email us and we might use it.

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Name: A-G Sonday
Location: Cape Town
Position: Editor, News

A-G has published 2163 posts. Read all of A-G's posts.
  • Mujabees

    Achievements suck trophies rock. I think its also about completion to 100% thats a draw and that shiny plat is for bragging rights. 

  • David Bleja

    Achievements/trophies in games are probably older than you are; they’re certainly older than I am. It’s just that they’ve just evolved into a slightly more sophisticated form. 

    It used to be that players would spend coin after coin to try and get their initials on the high score table of Frogger or Double Dragon. Not because they loved replaying the early levels over and over again so much, but because of the allure of beating a difficult challenge and being recognised for it. Modern-day achievements have simply expanded the concept to make it less one-dimensional (not solely based on a score).

    Yes, achievements are “arbitrary tasks”, but no more so than the games themselves: a game gives you a pretend challenge that is totally arbitrary and contrived (completing Mass Effect doesn’t actually save our galaxy; it doesn’t affect anything except your own imagination), and you feel good when you complete it.

  • Treble

    I also don’t get the whole big deal with feeling the need to get every damn trophy/achievement its like people who feel they have finished the game’s story mode but there trophy percentage only shows 30% so they aim to correct that by getting everything. Just chill out and enjoy it guys i mean to this date i don’t have a single platinum and although i am pretty close to the AC2 plat and just have to collect all 100 feathers i am not going to really bother with it

  • http://www.facebook.com/nanonyous Theo Lubbe

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_Test

    Way back when, I was reading up on this. I forget the details since I eventually lost interest, but there’s some established psychology behind why achievements in games exist (and should exist, even if in only in some rudimentary form, such as David explained).

    • AG_Sonday

      Agreed, sometimes they do motivate you to find those extra things that you wouldn’t normally but there are a lot that amount more to tedium than anything else.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=720787108 Charl Den Dulk

    I enjoy achievements in games, what would the point be paying for a game playing it and then having nothing to show for your efforts? I do agree though for some people chasing down achievements are now their primary goal and they totally forget about the game and story. 

    But achievements for me is a reward system for being a avid gamer and recognizing your skills as a gamer.

    http://www.xboxlivescore.com/profile/larch-ZA 

  • http://egamer.co.za/ Azhar Amien

    Don’t care about trophies/achievements, never have and never will. I consider them to be a waste of a time really. Unnecessarily extending game time so you can bore yourself completing tedious tasks.

    That’s just my opinion though.

  • http://twitter.com/MGTHABO Marko Swanepoel

    I think this applies to me on a huge scale because I have 130 000 Gamerscore. Now I get the point where people think achievements are lame and aren’t worth a thing, but here’s why I do it. If I played The Witcher 2 on PC with no achievements whatsoever I would have finished the game twice on both paths and just throw it to the side. Now, when I was going for achievements I had to play on Dark difficulty. I would have NEVER done that on the PC version.

    What followed was one of the most rewarding and exciting moments of my gaming life, just because I was so hell-bent on getting that achievement. I would have never collected all the Riddler trophies in Batman or finished games I didn’t hear about until I bought them for achievements and found myself enjoying them.
    Achievements made me a better gamer. I wouldn’t be so good at Guitar Hero today if it wasn’t for achievements. 

    Don’t let those banal grind achievements cloud your judgement. Some achievements require a great amount of skill and would be praised by many.  

    It’s a matter of taste though. I’m a completionist and like to finish all my games if I can. Other people play it for 4 hours and just chuck it. 

  • Cloud Strife

    I dont mind achievements and so forth too much but some games reward well. Like in Tony Hawk 2 for PS1, if you got all the gaps and yes, this was hard to achieve, you got spiderman and skateheaven unlocked, very rewarding indeed. It was also the last time I enjoyed anything spiderman related..

  • http://www.facebook.com/nadine.franzsen Nadine Franzsen

    Lets take Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Hitman Silent Assassin as examples. Now they existed before trophies and achievements, and tell me now how many of us did not try to 100% all the Splinter Cell levels and getting Silent Assassin ranking on every level? It’s a challenge set before us by the game devs and we as gamers, we like challenges, just like so many gamers like Demon’s Souls because it’s damn hard. It’s in our nature to beat someone/something. We have loads of rematches in multiplayer, against a friend or family member who we have to beat in a racing/fighting game. We are competitave and trophies show our successes. And it gives you bragging rights for sure.

    Now we just have something to show we did it, proof. It’s been taken a bit too far but I mean you gotta give a little to get a lot. Or something like that.

  • Yashaar Mall

    Fact is achievements and trophies have been around in gaming since its inception, just not in its current form. People used to always aim to achieve the highest score in an arcade game, or unlocking a secret character in Mortal Kombat by playing in a certain way, for example. Achievements also provide a player with an incentive to play higher difficulties and try different things.

    However, i reckon that at least 60% of Achievements are there just for the sake of it being there. But, then again, people are completionists, and there’s nothing more satisfying knowing you have completely maxed out a game.

    I will say I’m an achievement whore, but if you look at my gaming list, I’m only a whore for the games i love and  enjoy playing on a constant basis. But you do get other people, *Cough*, who will buy a game and play it solely for achievements.

  • http://www.facebook.com/brendon.bosch Brendon Bosch

    No time to read all the comments. This is from my experience. Myself and my friends where achievement whores but then first world problems rocked up and we had to limit getting achievements. So it`s no that important for us. There are some games i do however need to get as many achievements as possible

    Batman AA i got all of them. ME2 i was short by 4.

    So people will go for achievements and trophies as far as they can but when another game comes up then that out the window.

    I think Cavie can do it because his whole life revolves around games and it seems his time management allows for it. For those people who dont have as much free time as him it`s a different story

  • http://egamer.co.za/author/cavie Caveshen “CaViE” Rajman

    Hey fuck you guys. I played Green Lantern because I won it and before I sold it I wanted to at least play through it once to check it out, and it was actually a decent time-killer for the time I spent on it.

     I don’t see Achievements as something that increments an arbitrary amount (unless I do it in a competitive capacity for sport — as an example, a friend and I are racing to 50,000 GS, I’m leading) but rather something that complements a gaming experience. One of my first few columns was about Achievements and I said my peace there, though I could reiterate by basically stating Theo’s points and adding this:

    How many times have you gone: “Pics or it didn’t happen?”

    Achievements are the metaphorical “Pics” that proved the awesome or just mind-boggling things you’ve done, such as killing a hundred pigeons in GTA IV or beating Dark Souls, whether it’s something you want to boast about or something that proves you’re insane. We tried to achieve the 100% statistic in games anyway, so why not add Achievements for some extra fun?

    It’s for this reason that I disapprove of games with an easy maximum GamerScore for simply completing the game and not much else, and also why if you check my Games list you’ll see that I’ve not played many of those games unless they were proper fun experiences, as was the case with Most Wanted.

    Achievements are interesting, they get you doing things you otherwise wouldn’t but are entirely capable of. And why not? Why wouldn’t you kill someone with a chair in Crysis? Why wouldn’t you jump off a cliff and land on an opponent in order to survive, killing them in the process? These are things you would do without being asked to and then boast about, with few believing you. Now they put a title to it and reward you for doing it and you hate it? Please.

    Achievements complement the experience, they don’t dictate it. And if they do, then you’re doing it wrong.

    • AG_Sonday

      I was wondering when you’d rear your head :P.

      The movie was an abortion, how good could the game have been? Seriously though, I get where you’re coming from and can see what the appeal is in achievements, it’s just interesting to see what people’s opinions are on the matter given their popularity. I personally don’t care much for them and don’t feel they add all that much to the experience but that’s just me.

    • http://egamer.co.za/ Azhar Amien

      That’s one way to look at it, but with everyone getting assigned the exact same tasks, it seems way too lame to me. Personally, and this is my opinion, I couldn’t really see much joy in talking about what trophies or achievements I got, but much rather what I did in the game with my own creativity or in a splendid moment of awesome. Trophy/achievement hunting always seemed like tedious work to me rather than finding your own unique enjoyment out of a game.

      But hey, to each his own. I’m not really a completionist. I want to keep moving on to the next game :)

    • http://twitter.com/MGTHABO Marko Swanepoel

      ”
       I couldn’t really see much joy in talking about what trophies or achievements I got, but much rather what I did in the game with my own creativity or in a splendid moment of awesome.”

      Um… Why can’t we have both? I spent weeks talking about the shit I pulled off in Skyrim on Twitter and I just happen to have full gamerscore on it. The achievements add to the awesome moments like how everyone has a different story in how they managed to get 1000 bounty in every hold at the same time. Achievements have stories of their very own tied to them. 

      Cavie and I can go on for weeks about how we unlocked certain achievements or what game’s achievements were our favorite to obtain and how we did it.