Having just played The Saboteur and being pleasantly surprised with the game I realized I few things about myself and gaming, and also retouched on other realizations that I've had before.  
   The first things is that I've come to believe that my expectations alter my perception of a game.  By that I mean there have been several titles in the past few years that I've rushed out to buy only to play a few hours and then put it aside.  It may be that in some situations I get a feeling of having to commit over 50 hours to a game and become disinterested in doing so. In some cases the expectations on a game I've only spent $10-$20 dollars the expectations are less because I'll be out less money if I don't enjoy the game.  In other cases my expectations get built to a point that I think subconsciously I think that I'm going to be let down and don't follow through despite any number of people telling me what a great game it is like Fallout 3, Red Dead Redemption and Bioshock 1&2, which might also do with my tendency to want to collect things in a game to the point of excess, the " I Want It All" syndrome as I now call it.
   Having to collect everything has negatively impacted my experience with a number of games. I have started games over to get items i have missed, and I routinely rely on online guides to make sure I don't miss collectibles, and further so in games where achievements are tied to collectibles.  I don't honestly enjoy my compulsion, but it is just that, a compulsion. It bothers me when I don't get all the collectibles, at least the ones that tie into achievements.  Which brings me to how achievements and trophies have changed how I play. 
   I have been playing video/computer games since my father brought home a Commodore 128 (with a whopping 128KB of memory) and since that time have played countless hours of games and it has only been since the introduction of achievements that I now play games with a goal of getting achievements more so than enjoying the game solely for itself.  The only time I used to go to the internet for a game was when I got stuck and needed help on how to advance in a game, now I go to game websites for almost all games I play to see how hard it is to get achievements. 
   I do admit that achievements have prolonged gameplay in a positive way to see different outcomes of situations or use different types of characters and in doing so varies the gameplay to get more out of a game.  I mentioned The Saboteur at the start and part of what I didn't appreciate was achievements at the end that I spent time solely to get those achievements specifically the Casanova and Chain Smoker achievements. These involved kissing women to escape alarms, and stopping long enough to have the character smoking a cigarette respectively.  The women to kiss did not appear all that often in the game and appeared to be in specific locations which did not always happen to be where you needed to make your escape, and as for stopping, too often I was constantly moving to my next objective, thus making it feel less a part of the game and more of a separate entity.
   Finally, I was reading on Giantbomb the other day and someone mentioned that he or she was concerned with becoming more of a collector than a gamer.  I have long come to the conclusion that I am a collector more so than a gamer.  Too often I will go to bargain bins and look for value games fully knowing that I will likely never play at least a quarter to half of the games I buy.  Why I do this, I'm not entirely sure but it has made me realize that for a number of titles like Force Unleashed II , Fable III and Fallout New Vegas amongst other titles, there really is no point in buying these games until either a game of the year edition is released or until the game drops close to $20.  If I'm going to waste my money, I should at least waste less of it, especially when those games are sitting on a shelf as a constant reminder.