In this two-part piece, I’ll share some recent thoughts about the long-forgotten concept of high scores (well, at least forgotten to my personal gaming experience) and how it strangely crept back in my games and how we could give it a much needed facelift.
Residents of the spookhouse (which would be the name we gave our humble dwelling) went through a revival of old classics in the past few weeks. I never played Galaga in my younger years yet, the girlfriend and the roommate started playing like crazy on the Wii virtual console. The Turbografix version, titled Galaga ’90 ,offers some basic diagram of your progress through the levels on the game over screen, but otherwise the game itself (or the original Galaga), much like about all other games of its time, just wants a high score because it is conceived in such a way that you can’t beat it. When you score high enough, your name can be entered in the list of best scores which can be seen in attract mode.
So high score here means two things: it marks progress and gives bragging rights. You couldn’t possibly have scored that high if you hadn’t survived this long in the game, scraping for more time to score points. Also, whoever watches the high score list and sees your initials knows you mean business and can aspire to beat that score, possibly stealing your bragging rights, creating some sense of challenge out of static numbers.
Progress
High scores are a good way to mark progress in a game, and even in some examples were rigidly set so you could understand how close you were to completion. Police Quest (PC) and Leisure Suit Larry (PC), at least in their first incarnations, had scores showing you the highest possible amount from the get-go, so that you had an idea of approximately where you were in the whole game, much like when reading a book you can tell you are close to the end just by looking at the pages remaining in your hands.
Game mechanics evolved past this point and games like Mega Man (NES), which in its first title had a score meter, started showing progress in other ways. Seeing the face of the bosses disappear from their respective frame gives the player a very clear sense of progress, which rendered the high score useless for most games. Nowadays, simply by looking at trophies or achievements lists gives an idea of how long the game will be, even maybe spoiling some important information concerning the game’s narrative.
Recent examples of high score show that they no longer only indicates progress, but allow progress too. Sega’s The Club (Xbox 360), tried hard to rehabilitate the high score as a viable notion. You cannot progress through the game just by carelessly shooting everything in sight. You have to make precise kills, headshots, penetrating cover and whatnot. And the best you perform, the higher the score, and so you can unlock later levels. Space Invaders Evolution (iPhone) has you unlock almost all game mechanics with the high score (as an example, four-way movement is locked at the beginning of a new game and you have to earn it through the score of evolution points, which are the same as game score). Such a mechanic demands that the player become talented and thus spend time with the game. Which brings us to the other possible meaning of the score.
Bragging rights
Indeed, if games made away with high score as an indication of concrete progress, it still can be used to illustrate just how well a player made that progress. Most games now include variation of high scores, such as online rankings or bulletin-card-type letters to comment on player performance. Such information can be very useful in matching players of same skill together in online games.
But pure high score as bragging right might be a dead idea, killed by social networks. The ubiquitous option of uploading all and every gaming feat on Facebook by way of our home consoles is slowly making everybody sick of it. At least I can tell I am severely annoyed when my newsfeed is full of updates about Bejeweled, Farmville or Mafia Wars. Of course, each of these applications can be configured as to not fill the newsfeed, but as anyone who toyed with privacy options on a social network, it can rapidly become an unwelcomed part-time job. If high score is to be an occasion to brag about our skills, it needs to do it in-game.
Passive, attract-mode high score lists can still serve as a motivation or challenge to go beyond the earlier performance of another player, as brilliantly recreated by the virtual arcade Game Room (Xbox Live), in which a friend can visit your arcade room, and add a high score to your personal arcade machine that will float over the cabinet in watch mode, becoming a constant reminder that you’re not the best at your own game, and you might need to fight back for your turf. Many users sharing a home console, such as the tenants of the spookhouse vying for supremacy on the score boards of Wii Galaga ’90, can also recreate that old-school challenge of bragging rights and gameplay legends. These ideas keep the bragging to an in-game space, without pointlessly advertising to your whole social network on how you decide to spend your time.
Yet, there are other ways a high score could be rehabilitated in games. I’ll try to share some ideas on that matter in the second part of this piece.
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