Idle games tend to take this to the extreme, with typical games like Cookie Clicker often having counts eventually ranging from the quintillions to the decillions. This means that a score doesn't have to be legible, but after the game, it must cumulatively measure the exact merit of a current playstyle - with sports-like precision of fractions of a percent. Soccer has 1s, basketball has 2s and 3s, but in a videogame, you can land a hit that satisfies six different conditions and is multiplied by two different modifiers, plus a randomized factor. Finally, from game design standpoint, more granular points allow for more intricate scoring rules. The ultrafast numbers also connect with a host of stereotypes - from a frantic rush of a million-dollar jackpot to nail-biting sports programmes where one-thousandths of a second decide the winner. Not only it communicates a feeling of achievement, but it also makes the whole process more dynamic and provides important feedback (not unlike flashing lights and other telltales in pinball and action games - the feedback even scales, with more decimals places flashing meaning better result). Meanwhile, the extremely quick succession of hundreds of small numbers on a scoring readout or on a screen has both a purely visual appeal and utility. Of course, once we start doing this sort of inflation, we also tend to move our internal definition of 'average' a pinball machine that gave you scores in the 10s would, at first glance, look and feel much less impressive without some sort of context to justify it. It's very likely that early pinball designers inflated scores purely for the ability to state that you can earn more points than a competitor's and thus players of said machine were better despite, as this trope points out, it being an arbitrary distinction. Even when we start to break it down, we can trigger various human faults over how much we're getting and how much there is actually. 10,000 is basically the same as 1,000 (as far as a ratio goes), but it seems like a lot more at first glance. We like big numbers, yet are also somewhat bad at them, especially in comparison on the fly. One reason these inflated point counts happen is due to a handful of natural human biases. When used this way, the score is really more like two scores placed end to end. Examples include number of combos hit, or times you continued when your game would otherwise be over. There is a practical variant of this technique, in which the smaller digits, meaningless for scoring as many points as possible, are used to count something specific. note (Unlike in the West, East Asian languages subdivide numbers four digits at a time, rather than three.) 万 ( man) is ten thousand, 億 ( oku) is one hundred million, and, if you're lucky, you may see 兆 ( chou), or one trillion. If the game is in Japanese or Chinese, scores will sometimes have digit separator kanji to keep scores readable. Yet in the end, the extra powers of 10 are meaningless and serve only to make one's performance look that much more impressive. Zeros are particularly easy to append to scores, and many games (especially old ones) do exactly that: display extra trailing zeroes that are never counted internally. ![]() Some games will give you 10 points for an action that would earn you 100 points in another. ![]() Some games are simply more generous with their scoring systems than others. But when you think about it, what is a point? Can you quantify its value? Is a point in one game necessarily as valuable as a point in another game? Think about such things long enough, and you may come to the conclusion that a point is really nothing more than a bizarre variation of currency, easily redeemed for fame and glory.Īnd like currency, it can be subject to Ridiculous Future Inflation. ![]() In most sports and a number of video games, Scoring Points is the best way to keep track of your success.
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