On the Matter of Trophies

Nursing a slight hangover with some coffee, I began to wonder this morning: why are trophies (if I had an Xbox, they'd be called Achievements) so important to me?

I remember first thinking about this while playing through Bioshock 2, and obsessing over multi-player levels until I could achieve level 40 and finally grasp the platinum trophy for the game.  Why was I doing this?  What did the achievement matter to me?

It's possible it's narcissism.  I need the game to tell me I've done a good job and jumped over all of its defined hurdles.  But, it's more than that.

Trophies are fun to go after (if sometimes frustratingly so), and the feeling of completing them does give me happiness.  But the more comes in the fact that trophy challenges do just that: they challenge me.

The first game I made a platinum trophy in was Bioshock.  In order to obtain the coveted platinum trophy, the game asked for no less than to play it on "Survivor" difficulty, and without the use of nearby regeneration chambers.  Essentially, this meant if I died (which I did; many, many, many times), I would be forced to load from a saved game (which I notoriously bad at keeping up with).  This caused me to come at the gameplay in a completely different way.  And though sometimes I was frustrated, I'd never had more fun.

And back to Bioshock 2 for a moment.  I would never have stuck with the multi-player as long as I did without the incentive to obtain a platinum trophy.  But I loved the multi-player.  I enjoyed it completely!  Especially with my French roommate insisting that I save the girl (a type of Capture the Flag gameplay).

There are plenty of people who insist that trophies and achievements ruin gameplay.  That doing well in a game ought to be it's own reward, and that the goals set are arbitrary.  I completely disagree, and I'm stoked every single time the alert pops up that I got a trophy.  It may be narcissistic, and it may be petty, but I like the game telling me that I'm a good little boy.