Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
A score is an evaluation, and as the creator, it's up to you to decide what's being evaluated. Like
rewards, increasing score is a statement to the player that she's done something you consider
positive through the system of the game. Many games award higher scores for destroying
more enemies, for example. This doesn't shape resistance immediately in the way that in-game
rewards like a new verb or the unlocking of new spaces would, but it does send a message:
it's good to destroy enemies! If that's what you want your game to say, then it can be useful to
reinforce the verb-object structures of your game by reflecting those goals with higher scores.
Not every use of a verb or interaction with an object needs to result in a score; it's up to you to
decide what's significant for raising or lowering the score.
Because a score is an evaluation, it can feel like either a reward or a punishment, depending on
whether the score's presented by the system and interpreted by the player as being high or low.
A score usually involves numbers, or sometimes letter grades. In games with complex systems
of choice and lots of ways to do well, scores can sometimes be broken down into many differ-
ent measures of performance. Because scores turn some of the player's actions into numbers or
letters, they're useful for comparing performance between players. This is, of course, how scor-
ing has been used for centuries in sports and other competitive games. In more recent decades,
scores have appeared on leaderboards that let players compare what they've done in a game to
what their friends or vast populations of players online have done.
Scores in single-player games provide a special kind of comparison and feedback: the player
can compare her own scores at different times or on successive playthroughs of the game. As
a player, being able to track your own score over time provides deeper insight into how you've
pushed into a game and how the creators of the game have evaluated your actions. Of course,
all this depends on whether the system of scoring is clear enough for players to understand
what the score means. If you want a player to actively think about score and how to affect her
score, it's useful to be as clear as possible about what's going on. As with other rewards and
contextual cues, visual feedback is crucial, but a straightforward explanation of scoring can be
just as helpful.
Like some of the systems of reward we talked about earlier, score often exists outside of the
system of verbs, objects, and choices that the player pushes through while playing the game.
One of the things that makes score more interesting as part of the conversation, and not simply
something external, is that it takes its meaning from players' own understanding of how it's
important—or unimportant. In a competitive tournament where all players have agreed that
the highest-scoring player is the victor, comparisons of score are crucial; the score is imbued
with a lot of significance. In a single-player game, it's up to the player herself whether she wants
to pursue higher scores to beat her friends or her own past best efforts. Scores are an evalua-
tion and not simply rewards that lure the player on. They're useful as tools to help the player
gain her own insights into how and why she's playing.
