Who doesn't like a good pat on the back every now and then?  Whether it's for doing well in school or your job, it's always nice to see your hard work acknowledged, and in the best case, rewarded.

So why not expect the same for pulling off a really difficult headshot, or for scouring Liberty City for every tiny secret it has to offer?

Achievements in gaming have been growing in popularity, with different systems of stat tracking going into games on the PS3, 360, and PC.  Now I know that achievements are known as "Trophies" for PS3 owners, but since you have to 'achieve' something to get a trophy, I'm going to use the blanket term achievements in order to simplify things.  So don't feel slighted, PS3 owners, it's just to make things a bit easier to read ;)

 Achievements reward players for accomplishing certain tasks within a game, and are ranked differently usually by difficulty.  For instance, on the 360, achievements award certain amounts of Gamerscore points that accumulate on a player's profile.  On the PS3, the achievements are ranked in bronze, silver, gold, and the elusive platinum rank.  Achievements are rewarded for many different things, from simply beating a stage to getting 100 kills with a knife, and many, many other things.  Some are humorous, like killing an enemy with a rotten egg in Resident Evil 5, while others are a much more daunting task, like achieving 100% completion in GTA IV.

But how much do gamers care about achievements?  Do they really matter at all, or are they just another way to try and bring players back for another go through of a game?

From making a few posts on popular sites like Gamespot and Gamefaqs.com, I was able to gather a general consensus of how gamers really feel about the achievement systems available.  For the most part, the majority of gamers who replied said that they enjoyed achievements, and usually went for the ones they could accomplish without too much of a headache.  Others out there said that they always went for every achievement possible in a game, so they could further boost their Gamerscore or flip through their massive Trophy collections.  There were also those who didn't care about achievements at all, and thought that they are either pointless or a waste of time.

For those who enjoyed achievements in games, they said that it adds a good form of replayability to games that might otherwise lack it.