We Need a Trophy Room

Imagine yourself a professional bowler for a moment. You've been bowling for many years now and have built up quite a collection of trophies, as well as a handsome sum of money. While the money has either been spent or put away for Junior's bowling lessons, you have each and every one of your trophies displayed in a room built special for this purpose. You love your room. You love the trophies within this room. You may not go in there every day, but when you do it's nice to reminisce about the moments each trophy represents. Now imagine that, after earning so much money from winning tournaments, you had the opportunity to move into a much bigger, more attractive house. Your family wants to move, your friends and family want you to move - you basically have no choice but to move on. Unfortunately, for no other reason than "just because", you cannot take your beloved trophies with you. They must remain in your old house, into which no one will ever move. You can go back and visit them if you want, but the drive is a long one, and no one will be there to dust them off regularly. Basically, you'll probably never go back to visit them, despite all the work you put into earning them.

Okay, now step back into your own shoes - sorry, your pro-bowling days are gone now - and think about the above situation. It's a little silly, right? Why shouldn't the bowler be able to take his prized trophies to his new house? Simply put, he should.

Can all three of you readers see where I'm going with this? Sure you can! But I'll spell it out anyway: What happens to our achievements/trophies once the next generation of consoles releases? Should we even care?
Sure, not every gamer cares about these extra, perhaps meaningless, virtual trinkets; but many do, and I can see the possibility of losing these as a hot debate point for many gamers in the next year or so.

For my part, in the grand gaming scheme they really are worthless, and I would certainly still play and enjoy games withouth them. However, I still enjoy having something to take out of each game I play as a sort of reminder of what I did. Also, they offer their own unique challenges and actually change the way I play a lot of games now. I find myself being pushed harder to complete that FPS on veteran difficulty, complete more of the side quests in certain RPG's, and even pay more scrutiny to the levels as I search for that last collectable item - and all of these are due to the added replay value trophies/achievements add to games, which in the end means I'm getting more for my money.  This alone makes tro&chi's (which heretoforth shall be my word for you-know-what's) worth having around.  And, you know what?  I think I would be a little upset if I had to leave them all behind once the next generation of consoles land on store shelves.
I don't expect the next Playstation or Xbox to be backwards compatible (though I would prefer them to be), but I think some sort of consistency is reasonable.  And by this I mean being able to carry over our gamertags/PSN accounts, our tro&chi's, and perhaps even our downloadable games/DLC - the latter of which some of us have paid mightily for.

Here's what would make me happy:  Let us carry over our accounts to the new systems (which I think is highly likely, anyway), and offer some space on the dashboard for a sort of library/trophy room for our past played games.  It doesn't seem like much to ask - just as it may not seem like much to worry about one way or the other; but, hey, I earned those little digital bastards, and I wanna keep 'em!

Personally, I think this is really the only way to go if Sony and Microsoft let us keep our tro&chi's, as an ever-growing gamerscore would get a little out of hand in some cases, and (I don't know about anyone else) I'd rather start as a level 1 gamer once the PS4 is upon us - it just seems like the right thing to do.

Actually, now that I think about it, here's an even better suggestion for Sony and Microsoft: Gamerscores 30,000 and above net the player a year of free Xbox Live on the new system; and for Sony, gamers level 12 and above get a free year of Playstation Plus on the PS4.  Get on it, ladies and gents!