Highscore Lists

Why a highscore list?
Most games nowadays give you a score while you play the game and allow you to put your name and score in a highscore list. But why? Giving players a score has two goals.

On one hand the score shows the player that she is making progress in the game. The higher the score the more progress you made. Beating the highest score is a clear indication that you got better at playing the game and this gives you satisfaction.

Besides showing progress, a score is also a reward. This is in particular the case if the score gives you social status. But to this end it is important people can see the scores of other players. And a highscore list is an excellent way to achive this.

Score as progress
To use the score as a progress indicator, the score should be a good indication of how good you are at playing the game. In quite some games, getting a high score is largely a matter of luck. If you happen to get this special point bonus you suddenly get a large score. For example, in the SkyDiver game on the website (which is actually fun to play) you get a score based on two things: time you survive and boxes with points you gather. The time you survive is clearly a good indication of your progress. And to collect the boxes you have to carefully maneuver which is also a sign of progress. However, there are boxes of 5, 10 and 50 points and they seem to appear randomly. A total score of 250 is already rather good. But such a score is highly influenced by getting a few 50 point boxes. So these 50 point boxes destroy the mechanism and turn the scores into primarily a matter of luck. They simply should not have been there or should occur very rarely and only at very difficult places.

In some other games, getting a high score is mainly a matter of patience. These are games in which you will get a high score if you are willing to stay forever at the initial parts of the game or are willing to continuously repeat the same actions or are willing to spend the time to lift up or click on any item in the levels. It has nothing to do with you expertise in the game. Although some people like this for most it means that the score has no real value.

Score as reward
Besides showing progress, a score is also a reward. This is in particular the case if the score gives you social status. If you can tell your friends that you managed to reach a very high score they might look up at you. This is why highscore lists are so important. If your name appears in the highscore list it shows that you are better than other people playing the game.

But obviously, this only works if other people’s scores indeed end up in the same list. This is clearly the case in Arcade game machines and this is also the place where the highscore lists were invented. It also works when multiple people play on the same computer. But nowadays everybody has his own computer and, hence, a local highscore list does not add much satisfaction to the game.

One thing you can do to improve this is to prefill the list with some scores of a beginner, average, good, and excellent player. Now beating these artificial players become a challenge which increases the interest of the player in repeatedly playing the game.

Online highscore lists
But clearly the best is if the highscore lists are stored online and they will collect the scores of everybody that is playing the game. Now it really means something when you are on the first place.

However, with online highscore lists, a different problem occurs. After a while it becomes almost impossible for anybody to get into the highscore list because the people in the list have such incredibly high scores. And once a goal looks impossible to reach people lose interest in trying to achieve it. So they will stop playing the game.

So you should have more than one list. You can have an all-time high list, a monthly, weekly, or daily list. Maybe you can create regional lists. And you could also give people the possibility to create their own pools in which they can try to beat each others score. People also like to brag about their score or, more positively, help people to achieve higher scores. So adding some sort of chat or comment mechanism to it might increase the interest.

Conclusions
Highscore lists are important, in particular when multiple people play the game. But you have to define your score mechanism carefully to achieve the best effects. Next time you create a game I hope this will make you think a bit more about the scores.