Achievements & Trophies: The Addiction

Achievements & Trophies: The Addiction

Are you an Achievement or Trophy addict?

Greg Giddens shares his addiction and discusses its effects.

I KEEP telling myself that achievements and their related gamerscore are nothing but arbitrary numbers for stereotypical nerds to boast about to their D&D posse at the next big geek-a-thon. But the truth is I absolutely love them, and they’re starting to dictate my game playing habits.

Social suicide

Now there’s a few of you out there just about ready to tear me a new one for adoring achievements so much – you know who you are – but I just can’t help myself; I like collecting things. I’ve got Magic the Gathering cards and Warhammer carefully hidden in my draws, not to mention a whole host of other less adult orientated products that I feel a little embarrassed over, and other people rarely help with this feeling of shame. This one time when I brought a girl home, she spotted my Star Trek films and boxsets and laughed her tight little ass off; completely ruining the mood I’d spent several hours and countless gin and tonics cultivating.

You see the problem is, collecting things is addictive and a lot of fun, and I give in to it willingly, but I don’t really know why…oh and I actually love D&D and am the local king of the annual geek-a-thon.

Perhaps it’s a primal instinct from our hunter gatherer days; a need to possess things for survival and prestige. Of course now survival is easier for the individual and so it’s all about the prestige, and although having a collection of Boglins makes you look like a weirdo to the majority, to the fellow collector it grants you kingship. Achievements and trophies aren’t any different, to the fellow game enthusiast it’s a common ground beyond genre preferences; it’s a leaderboard of completionists and obsessives vying for prestige.

The enablers

So the collection magic is inherent to achievements and trophies but why are achievements considered more valuable than trophies to the majority? It’s a question with no concrete answer. The Xbox 360 implemented achievements alongside the release of the console, whilst the PS3 adopted their trophy system after the consoles release; as an afterthought. With the awards system adopted late and the PS3 having been released so long after the Xbox 360, perhaps the concept was subconsciously absorbed by gamers as an achievement system, directly relating to the Xbox 360’s implementation of it. Or perhaps it’s nothing to do with who had it first and how it’s perceived, perhaps more so it’s how it’s been implemented.

Xbox 360 achievements are a prominent part of the dashboard and community services – such as friend list comparisons – whilst the PS3 trophies are more hidden. Despite trophies being much clearer about each individual award’s value and serve as a clearer indicator of a games completion regardless of DLC with the use of the platinum awards, due to achievements strong ties with the community they are more easily compared against other players, therefore relating more directly with the collector and their collection addiction. Implementation seems to be the key, regardless of which system is better overall the one that wins out is always going to be the one the community can more easily relate to, access, and compare against.

Continues…

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