At My Limit: Trophies and Achievements

Just about everyone who has had some exposure to the current generation of gaming is familiar with trophies or achievements. For those of you who are thinking "Wait, you can get trophies for playing games at home?", yes, indeed you can. However, these are simply virtual awards for completing specific tasks in the game. If you play games on a PlayStation 3 you are awarded trophies and they cumulatively add to your gamer "level". On Xbox 360, however, you gain achievements in the same way, but they give you "gamer points" which pretty much amount to the same thing. Some players are obsessed with them, and others believe them to be a stupid waste of time.

Recently, someone close to me has begun calling me a "trophy whore" from time to time as a joke. The term trophy, or achievement "whore" refers to someone who plays games with the goal of increasing their gamer level or score. Most of these gamers are looked down upon. They don't really play games to enjoy them, but simply to gain bragging rights from their enormous amounts of trophies or achievements. So because my gaming honor has been questioned, I bring this topic to the table: Achievements and trophies, are they a bad thing?

To really examine how gaming awards effect players we have to look at them from different perspectives. We could speculate on the pros and cons of the topic, but there's not really anything conclusive either way, so this is purely my point of view on the matter. There are two ways to look at awards in video games: 1. As an incentive, or 2. As a mile marker.


As an incentive trophies are limitations. Achievement whores play a game, not for the game itself, but to collect all the achievements and increase their gamer score. In this way, you are limiting yourself within the game. Instead of enjoying a game for what its meant to be, challenging and fun, you have turned it into work. You have essentially made your gamer level or score something of extreme importance and started "level grinding" to gain a higher level and therefore more prestige among your online friends. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term "level grinding", it refers to the act of doing a repetitive action in a video game to gain experience for your character and gain more levels with him. It is usually very time consuming and feels more like work than play.)

If you sit in the house all day playing video games, and are gamer level 100 on PlayStation Network, you should be pitied, not exalted. Video games are not life, they are a hobby, a form of entertainment for your pleasure. If you make money by playing video games, more power to you. (Real money, rupies and poke-yen do not count.) But trophies and achievements in video games do not compare to real life accomplishments. I mean, getting a gold trophy from a PlayStation game looks pretty silly when compared to winning something like, say, the Stanley Cup.

On the other hand, if we look at it as a mile marker, we can look at achievements in a better light. Games have always been about competition and challenge, and video games are no different. Before trophies and achievements came along gamers would brag that they beat Castlevania without dying, collected every ring in a level of Sonic, or beat Super Mario 64 in an hour. Now, with achievements, you can prove it.

Achievements also add a list of side challenges to the game. When I played PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale, I decided I wanted to collect all the trophies. (I'll get to my reason why later.) One of the trophies was to win a match without dying. This was extremely difficult, but gave me a new challenge to attain to. The same thing has happened when I have played Far Cry 3, Skyrim, Mass Effect, and other games. The fact that the trophies were there was something that I wanted to do in addition to all the other features in the game to add more challenge, not because I craved the trophy.

That being said, I am not a "trophy whore". Do I like trophies and achievements? Yes. I think they are a great way of showing off your gaming skills to other players. But they should not be valued to the point of playing games simply to get them. That's it for today. Hope you enjoyed my rant on trophies and achievements.

What do you think about awards in video games? Leave a comment below with your response. Also, feel free to request any topic to be discussed in future "At My Limit"s or games you'd like to see me review.