Many gamers think trophies were created by some generous Sony exec or a philanthropic game developer to give longevity to today’s generation of games.<\/p>\n
This is a lie.<\/span><\/p>\n Trophies were in fact created by an awkward, misanthropic bastard who never won any of his own in his entire life; you know, the fat kid who sat at the back of the class sucking on his asthma pump for dear life and dreading whatever sport was to be played during the next break time where he’d no doubt be picked last over that kid with the prosthetic leg or a girl three grades below him.<\/p>\n Yeah, okay, so it’s no secret that I completely loathe trophies. But why dislike something that surely exists only to add more playtime to my games?<\/p>\n I’ll elaborate.<\/p>\n I realized many years ago after splurging every penny of my pocket money on tokens to complete Contra at the local arcade that I was slightly obsessive-compulsive; not clinically, mind you, but just the kind of person who likes doing things properly. This behaviour has followed me into adult life, and while it makes for exemplary tax returns and spotlessly clean living quarters (I could seriously eat off the floor if it didn’t clash so badly with my OCD tendencies), it’s a real bitch when it comes to completing games.<\/p>\n This brings me to my first actual gripe: some trophies are just too damn difficult. Gems that come to mind are ‘World Champion’ in Ghost Recon (reach the top of the international rankings), ‘Heroic Survivor’ in Killzone 2 (finish every mission on Elite), or ‘Seven Day Survivor’ in Dead Rising (play for a whopping 22 hours straight). Now who in their right mind has the time to spare attaining such hard-won prizes apart from retirees and other marathon gamers not ashamed to wear adult diapers?<\/p>\n Conversely, there are those trophies that are not only too easy, but actually impossible not to get. Countless titles nowadays reward trophy-whore gamers for trying tasks like flipping a switch, starting a new game, or following the only linear path available in order to progress; this stupid system is tantamount to being rewarded for merely staying conscious while playing. I don’t know who they think they’re catering for here but I’ll bet that video games are not a common pastime for northern suburbs kugels, anyone wearing a tinfoil hat, or the guy who set our matric pass at 35%.<\/p>\n I’m also concerned that these pervasive little icons of supposed achievement are making game developers lazy. Why spend crucial coding time putting in pants-wettingly-exciting tasks like time limits for missions or collecting seemingly innumerable flags\/feathers\/other random crap when they could’ve added another level or two? I’m sure most gamers would rather have some extra missions in any of the Grand Theft Auto games rather than driving around looking for those ******* stunt jumps.<\/p>\n Also, not content with trophies being either so easy that you facepalm yourself with your controller, or so hard that you facepalm someone else, some genius thought it a good idea to make the little buggers invisible. Now, this has confounded me for ages: why should we be forced to Google a list of trophies for every game we own? Why can we not be provided with a full list under our trophies menu? I’m not sure about everyone else, but I’m certainly not masochistic enough to fire up Resistance 2 to try to rack up 10 000 multiplayer kills just in case it might yield a measly trophy.<\/p>\n And while we’re on the topic of how these damn things are implemented, I feel I’m not alone in being infuriated by the way they invade my gaming at the most inappropriate times. Just when I’m starting to feel immersed into a cutscene, WHAM: random achievement. Trying to concentrate on a crucial bit of dialogue, BOOM: random congratulations. It’s like holding a controller while watching VH1’s Pop-Up Video except they’ve somehow defied all reasonable belief by actually making the little factoids more useless.<\/p>\n It’s pretty clear that the trophy list for any game is full of more pointless achievements than the latest volume of Guinness World Records. They annoy me, they infuriate me, and they taunt me, and not just because of my mild obsessive-compulsiveness. There are times though I wish I didn’t have a job or a need for social interaction or sunlight, and I could waste away the hours trying to ‘plat’ all of my games. But, sadly, I don’t, and I can’t think of any functional member of society who, like me, would not go completely batshit insane trying to get their entire game collection to that elusive 100%.<\/p>\n In fact, the way I see it, finishing a game without freaking out that I didn’t get every trophy is more than achievement enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dan Parmenter offers his opinion on why trophies are wasting both our time and brain matter<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_enabled":true,"_sma_x_custom_text":"","_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8765"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8765\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mygaming.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}