You Have Earned a Trophy: Characterize In-Game Achievements and Their Completions

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes PlayStation trophies by constructing a comprehensive dataset, providing insights into their design and player engagement from both developer and player perspectives.

Contribution

It creates the first complete dataset of PlayStation trophies and offers an in-depth analysis of their characteristics and impact.

Findings

Trophies vary significantly in design and difficulty.

Player engagement correlates with trophy complexity.

Developers' design choices influence trophy completion rates.

Abstract

Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players' interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been casually discussed in many game developers' forums, there has been no systematic study of the historical dataset of trophies yet. In this work, we construct a complete dataset of PlayStation games and their trophies and investigate them from both the developers' and players' perspectives.