Achievements, trophies and unlocks are quintessential to my current gaming, is this a bad thing?

Before I begin I would usually argue that gamerscore and achievements have brought something superb to the gaming world, and that to me is most certainly true. However there is another side to gamerscore and that’s the taint it’s brought upon gaming

I’ve blogged this as it’s essentially my personal opinion however I’m sure it applies to others also. Now relating slightly to Marks topic about community games I mentioned the fact that one of the main reasons I didn’t purchase them was because of the lack of achievements, this is correct and applies to the mass.

When purchasing a game I look at a few factors; whether the game is looking good, sorts of reviews it has and then I decide the format to purchase it on. This usually results in me purchasing for the Xbox 360. The Xbox 360 is my preferred console however the main driving force behind my purchase is that fact I’ll be getting achievements and gamerscore to kind of show off my games progress.

Essentially the gamerscore situation is brilliant and gets me playing games I would not have touched previously however it’s got to the point where I would purposely not buy a game if I didn’t receive an award for playing, prime examples of this are related to PS3 / PC games. Now my PC doesn’t get a lot of use for games anyway as I’ve kind of broke away from that scene but in the terms of the PS3 I will not get a game unless it has the trophies attached to it (or of course it has an outstanding review). Example of this is for Metal Gear Solid 4, I’ve been putting off the purchase in the hope of trophies being introduced at a later date.

This however hasn't gotten to the state that I play all games just for the points, the majority of the time I really enjoy the game and tend to play first, clean up the achievements later. Some games however I have rented strictly for gamerscore but sometimes this works out for the best and a real gem comes out of the gamerscore rough.

So there’s my little insight into the dark side of achievements and gamerscore. Having written this it won’t stop me collecting those points.