Numeric Score

Events are assigned point values, points accumulate, and the total is displayed. Nothing else is required: no save file, no identity, no persistence between sessions. Because that number is the only feedback which survives a moment of play, it becomes the yardstick for everything, which means a designer's choice of what to reward is effectively a statement about what the game is for.

Pong displayed two digits in 1972 because it had to, since a competitive game needs a way to declare a winner and Atari's hardware could count. Arcade economics then made scores central, because a machine has to tell strangers who did well and why they should try again. Scoring also solved a design problem for games with no ending, giving open-ended activity a way to say the player improved.

Points shaped decades of play and then quietly retreated. Once games gained saves, stories and progression, an abstract number stopped explaining what a player had achieved, and score now survives mainly where mastery is the explicit subject. Its logic did not vanish, though. Experience, gear level, ranks and achievements are all scores with better dressing, and the same critique applies to all of them: the metric distorts the play.