Achievements on Xbox 360 and Trophies on PlayStation 3 — whatever you want to call them — they have changed the way that we play games … for better or worse.

I will admit; I am a Trophy hunter. I’m always trying to get as many Trophies as possible. While Achievements and Trophies are a cool and exciting addition to games, they also have the potential to be harmful to the way we play.

Before Achievements and Trophies, we played because we simply enjoyed gaming. We didn’t need to get a Trophy or Achievement to feel satisfied; finding shortcuts in racing games or even simply reaching the end was enough to make us happy.

Today, simply completing the story mode is just not enough. We must collect every treasure, find every Playboy magazine, and unlock every lock-box. Why do we do this? It is because we really love the games we are playing or because we want to show off to our friends?

Social networking, in general, has affected the ways we act and the things we do, and I believe it has affected the way we game as well. The 360 and PS3 both allow you to share your Achievements or Trophies with your Facebook friends. Playfire is a social network created specifically for gaming. Your friends will always see what you’re playing and how many Achievements or Trophies you have earned. And, of course, these things can be shared on Facebook. Does this drive us to play games — even really bad ones — just to boost our Gamerscore or PlayStation Network level?

I have heard of people purchasing poor quality games just because they want to have a lot of Trophies. One game that is known to have one of the easiest Platinum Trophies — the highest such reward on a PS3 game — is Megamind: Ultimate Showdown. Apparently, the Trophy can be earned in less than three hours. (If the only Platinum you have is for a game like this, that doesn’t count!)

Admit it — as soon as you get that Achievement or Trophy that you’ve been working on for weeks or even months, you post a status about it or even directly share it to your Facebook wall — excuse me, “timeline.” One can only wonder if we are, maybe subconsciously, playing games solely to impress others.

I will admit that when I was trying to decide whether to buy Sleeping Dogs on PC or PS3, I ultimately chose PS3 because I wanted to get the Trophies and try for the Platinum. I know Steam has Achievements, but maybe, just maybe, I wanted others to see my trophies in their news feeds.

By getting Achievements or Trophies in games, we get a false sense of accomplishment. Maybe those of us who aren’t really happy with our lives are the same people who are Achievement and Trophy hunters. Getting a Platinum Trophy or 1000 Gamerscore is the gaming equivalent of getting an A-plus on a test or getting a raise at a job.

While I do believe that Achievements and Trophies have changed the way we game in a bad way, I also believe that they have had a positive effect.

If you look at it from a monetary point-of-view, when you get every single A chievement or Trophy, you are getting your full money’s worth. People who don’t have much money for games usually try to experience their games to 100 percent completion because they feel that is the only way to really make it worth the 60 bucks that they paid.

Remember the reason you started gaming in the first place. It wasn’t for the Trophies or the Achievements. It was for the sheer joy of gaming. You should play because you truly love doing it. So sit back, relax, and just enjoy the unique and wonderful world of gaming.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Since the launch of the Xbox 360, there has been a fairly prominent community of gamers dedicated to obtaining as many Achievement points as they can possibly get. While many of us have experienced our fair share of Achievement hunting, others have gone to the extremes.

Some have questioned the purpose of Achievement points. Internet forums and blogs have been littered with questions such as, “What is the point of Achievements?” and “Are Achievements a distraction to gaming?” since the feature was introduced with the Xbox 360 in 2005. While Achievement points may puzzle some, they have spawned a new way to play games. Many websites with large communities are dedicated to them, with users sharing tips and writing guides on how to unlock them.

For those who want the highest Achievement score possible, a common practice is to track down games from other regions than their own, which isn’t very easy to do. If you’re trying to get as many points as possible, you have to be creative by doing things out of the ordinary. Most gamers only have a single Xbox 360. Those looking for the most Achievement points have one for every region of the world so they can unlock them in Japanese and European games not available in their own country. Most people only own one version of any given game. Gamers looking to gain the maximum points possible will hunt down the U.S., Japanese, and European versions of a single game because of the separate Achievement sets for each region.

A typical game released in the United States has 1,000 Achievement points. But when the same game is released in another region, such as Japan or Europe, it sometimes carries a separate set of Achievements. That means if you unlock all 1,000 points in the U.S. version of the game, you can then play the same game again and get 1,000 more points in the Japanese version. A frequent tactic for Achievement hunters is to buy a U.S., PAL, and Japanese Xbox 360 console in order to play every game from every region. For example, the game Catherine has three sets: U.S., Japan, and Europe. Sometimes a specific country in Europe will get its own set. A title that has multiple sets is called a “stack-able” game.

In some instances, the Asian and Korean version of the game will be stack-able. In a unique case, the Russian PC version of BioShock 2 and Mafia 2 carry their own Achievement sets. The most stack-able game is Scene It? Bright Lights! Big Screen!, which has seven separate versions (North America, Europe, Germany, France, Canada, Spain, and Italy). Because players answer trivia questions, separate versions of the game were created with specific questions geared toward the respective countries it was released in. When interviewing a user of a popular Achievement tracking website, he informed me that he knew of several people who have owned multiple copies of Scene It?, and he knew of one individual who had owned down all seven versions of the game.

Tracking down versions from other regions can be tricky. It can mean navigating a foreign retailer’s website in a language you cannot understand. Or it can involve trying to fund an account from a different country. I saw one instance of a user calling up a store in China, asking the employee if he was certain the copy of the game the store carried was in fact the “Asian” version. Many Achievement hunters set up game exchanges. There are forum threads dedicated to trading games from player to player. One user informed me that his friend ordered games from the German version of Amazon, but because it didn’t ship to the U.S., he first had to ship them to New Zealand and then to the U.S.

I asked what the hardest game was to find — if there was one game that was the “holy grail.” He said, “I think the hardest game to find is the Chinese version of Every Party, which I do have. The AP version of Ninety-Nine Nights II has been one I have been having a lot of trouble locating. I knew of a place that had it, but they don’t carry it anymore.”

Unlocking Achievements in Xbox Live Arcade games is a different obstacle. Sure, if you live in the United States, you can easily purchase and download U.S. games. But what if you want to download an XBLA game that was released only in Korea or Japan? There are several barriers. Users on the website Xbox360acheivements.org have written guides on how to access foreign XBLA stores. These show you illustrations about how to navigate the official Xbox website to create Canadian, Europe, and Japanese accounts. Common phrases found in these instructions include “navigate here,” “select Japan as the country you live in,” “make sure you register this specific way or it won’t work,” and so on. It’s a very tricky process as Microsoft never intended or wanted people from the United States to make accounts in other regions. When an XBLA store blocks you from using its website because you have an American I.P. address, many gamers use a VPN to makes it appear as if they’re in another country.

Even when you use these elaborate techniques, you can still hit a roadblock. A top user from Xbox360acheivements.org informed that Korean downloadable games were impossible to get unless you actually lived in Korea. This is because in order to make a Korean Xbox Live account, you need to provide the Korean equivalent of a Social Security card. Microsoft has also been known to ban accounts.

Some people may not like or “get” Achievements, but it’s pretty clear that they’re here to stay. The experiment of requiring Achievements for every Xbox 360 game has been successful. Many wonder what will become of these points in the next generation of the Xbox. Whatever the future holds, it’s clear that people will continue to love Achievements.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Heyzap keeps adding new features for developers to insert into their mobile games in an attempt to get more players. Today, the San Francisco mobile social gaming network is launching social achievements for mobile games.

The achievements are the latest addition to Heyzap, which it’s positioning as a replacement for OpenFeint, the network that Japan’s Gree is currently shutting down. Heyzap wants developers to use its social platform so that they can get more users through no-cost viral means.

Three weeks ago, Heyzap launched social leaderboards that showed what your friends were accomplishing in mobile games. The new achievements platform is available for iOS and Android. The leaderboards are now being used in 100 games and 225,000 scores have been submitted. Overall, games using the Heyzap platform are played by more than 9 million people.

With the achievements, a user plays a game and unlocks an achievement. That achievement is saved on the device, but the player can sign up with Heyzap and share it with friends. Developers can use Heyzap’s own collection of achievements if they wish. Heyzap was founded in 2008.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Salesforce-owned customer support app Desk.com has added a new “achievements” feature to motivate service representatives to earn badges as they help more people.

Desk.com launched in January and competes with Zendesk and TalkDesk to give small and medium-sized companies cloud-based customer support management. With the super simple desktop and mobile apps, business can field questions and issues through phone, email, web, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels. While Desk.com wont reveal its number of customers, notable companies including Square, Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, Vimeo, Grooveshark, and Bonobos use the service.

The new achievements feature essentially is an automated system that rewards service reps for various accomplishments. Some examples are helping a certain number of customers, resolving a case in less than a minute, responding to certain number of emails, or helping a customer on the weekend. The new badges will go live for all Desk.com users on Thursday.

“This is about boosting customer happiness,” Alex Bard told VentureBeat. “It’s also a good tool to add greater productivity.”

Bard said that the company will look at adding further achievements, especially looking at ways to have satisfied customers give badges and positive feedback to the agents that helped them through a problem. He also likes the idea of making it so a boss that oversees service reps can reward them with badges too.

“This is our first foray into this, so this is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bard said.

Check out the 16 new Desk.com achievements below:

Call center photo via dotshock/Shutterstock