Why are trophies so important? Shouldn’t it be about the games?

Yes, it always has been and always will be about the games. I, personally, wouldn’t waste hours and hours of game-play on something that was an utter bore, just to collect trophies. But like building a house, the game itself is the foundation, the concrete bottom, the brick, the woodwork, and drywall which forms the shelter. Trophies, for me, is the painting, the wallpaper, and pictures on the wall. They add color and detail which transform a house into a home.

Let me give you an example. Long before Trophy Support was available, I purchased the game Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. The game had a great story, amazing graphics, and I spent hours of fun shooting bad guys and solving puzzles. I cleared the game, felt relatively proud of myself, then placed it back on the shelf. Over time, the game collected dust.

Then, nearly a year later, the long-awaited firmware update on my PlayStation 3 brought with it the chance to collect trophies, and Uncharted happened to be the first retail game to support it. I blew the dust off my game, slid in the disk, and set to work.

I spent hours, days, weeks performing all the necessary challenges. I searched for every little treasure, made stealth attacks, head shots, used every weapon to collect the required kills, played through on Medium, on Hard, and finally on Crushing mode. Then came that wonderful bling, and I had my first platinum trophy.

The game went back on the shelf. But this time I felt deeply satisfied. I’d completed every possible challenge in the game. I’d played through the story four times. I’d beaten Uncharted on its highest difficulty setting.

I’d crushed the game!

Let’s face it – games are expensive, and we want to get our money’s worth. With trophies to collect, we have a reason to play the games over again, to partake in challenges we ordinarily wouldn’t bother with, to try beating the games on their more challenging settings.

Sure, trophies can be a form of bragging rights, either among friends or online strangers. In a way, they show-off how much gaming we do, how skilled we are, and how much patience we have. But the bottom line, is that we must put in extra effort to acquire these trophies, and extra effort means extra hours. Game companies are happy, because we are not immediately handing our cleared games to Amazon or Gamestop for resell. And customers are happy, because we are getting more hours of enjoyment out of the product.

And besides, gaming is supposed to be about fun. So if collecting trophies is fun for some people, then why not?

written by Damon Finos