nar·cis·sism
[nahr-suh-siz-em] also nar·cism (-s iz'em)n.
Sony recently released an application tying together Playstation and Facebook accounts. The application will sync the Facebook account with the trophies earned from the Ps3 account, then share your nerdiness with the rest of your friends who probably don't care. Do your friends really care that you have accomplished 80% trophies on Modern Warfare 2? Or that you recently purchased Burn Zombie Burn! from the PSN store?
Pwnage videos and trash talk are one thing; I think your kill-streak montage is really cool to the music of Puddle of Mudd, and I'm real sorry about my mom acting up, but sharing all of your accomplishments with people who don't ask?
For those that do a lot of internet forum trolling, self-boasting signatures are also a dime a dozen: kill-death ratios, scoreboard placement, and hours played a few ways gamers show their superiority.
I'm not saying a gamer shouldn't be proud of his accomplishments, but is it necessary to flatter one's self by letting the rest of the world know?
Isn't the fun of playing a video game, playing the video game? Has it become about the award and not the play? But that's more about trophies, and that's a different topic all together.
Comments (6)
You're right--most people don't care about your Xbox Live achievements. However, I think there is still a sense of satisfaction in having your achievements displayed publicly. I worked my ass off to get nearly every achievement in Halo 3, even though no one but me cares. I guess it's my own personal trophy collection that I can look back on and say either, "Wow, I can't believe I did that!" or "Wow, I can't believe I wasted so much time doing that!"
That is the sole reason I got rid of facebook after 4 months, especially when all those apps starting spamming everything. Once you get rid of facebook, you realize how stupid it is and never go back.
It's nothing new. This was going on well before games took it there or the social networking. The old out-of-shape dude that used to be a star athlete back in high school that loves to show you his old high school trophies from 20 years back. The slideshow from the family members of the trip to some out of the way villa in a trip you really don't care about.
Hell, if I'm not going to kill the facebookers, twitters or anyone else that much. Think many people away from here care about anything I write on Bitmob? Hell, you think anyone that visits the site care?
It's all point of view. When it's the crap you care about, suddenly it has value and isn't so much annoying crap anymore.
As in, the gameplay isn't fun any more, but you just neeeed them trophies?
I think that's another interesting aspect of social networking and all. Before all this blew up, I probably might have done something like that only to see story elements or hidden endings I missed but never achievements or stuff like that. Actually I did it with Final Fantasy games a lot. Granted I was in school then. Now that stuff is up and linked before I even finish. So I essentially play through the game the way I'd naturally do it knowing I have that stuff to fall back on if I missed something.
