Scoring Essay PDF

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES
ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT

ARE ASPIES
Which brings us to my inevitable showdown with the whole scoring debacle, whicku given all the cans of worms I opened up above,
can no longer be delayed.
So first thing that needs to be done here is to dispel the widespread notion that I actually like and support the idea of scoring
systems in videogames; indeed I've even somehow managed to become regarded as its most fervent advocate! And why, may I ask?
Because I once wrote an essay praising the arcade culture, an essay
which barely mentions scoring even once, and even then merely
in passing. But that's subhumans for you: studies even show that,
strictly speaking, subhumans do notread, but merely skim, registering at most two or three words out of several dozen, and making
the rest up (which is a far more energy-efficient tactic than ProPer
reading, since making shit up is practically effortless compared to
trying to understand what the other fuckin'Person's saying to you,
something which, as mentioned, requires not only brainpower but
also an excess of energy, energy which the subhumans do not have,
and therefore cannot give).
So, for the benefit of the subhumans in the audience: I neaer said
that I liked the idea of scoring in games; if I have praised, in reviewt
the scoring system s of some gameq it is only comPared to the scoring
systems of other, similar games, and not to how those games would
play if we removed those systems and replaced them with properly
integrated mechanics (which scoring mechanics by definition neaer
are), a substitution whichu as I'11 be showing shortly, would have
a profoundly positive effect on the quality of these games. This,
then, to continue with the explanation of how it's possible for me
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to praise one game's scoring system over another's, while simultaneously being in principle againsf the very idea of scoring, is the
same thing that happens when I review for example a JRPG. The
fact that I am reviewing a particular application of a concept does
not mean that I believe it is the most appropriate solution in that
specific case, let alone that I utterly and wholeheartedly endorse
the concept in a universal context. (Nor is the review of a game that
includes scoring the appropriate place in which to denounce the
very idea of scoring; the appropriate place is a general theoretical
essay, much like the one you are currently readi^g.)
This, then, is how my position ais-d-r.rls scoring was misunderstood: the subhumans have basically (and fallaciously, as we'll be
seeing) equated arcade games with scoring, and when they saw me
praise the former, they "naturally" assumed that I had also meant
to do so for the latter.
But as I hope I've finally made clear, I never did, nor "meant"
to do any such thing, on top of the fact that IT IS STUPID TO
EQUATE ARCADE GAMES WITH SCORING, since many of them
EITHER DO NOT HAVE SCORING, or have scoring systems that
are obviously gratuitous and superfluous. Take, for example, THE
ENTIRE FIGHTING GENRE: is someone going to seriously come
forward and contend that anyone who plays these games pays attention to the score? The only reason fighting games have scoring
is BECAUSE STREET FIGHIER /1 HAD SCORING, and the only
reason Street Fighter II had scoring (and the original Street Fighter), is
becausg much like with continuing, arcade games of that era TDere
simply expected to. (Or why do fighting games, for example, feature
continues? You can challenge the winning player the very next moment after a defeat, even if you dont continue!) And the same goes
for more or less most racing, gun shooting, platform games and the
like, and indeed the vast majority of games released between the
so-called "Golden" era (it was nothing of the kind) of Pac-Man and
Galaga and the current modern era of Cave and co., which is to say
the vast majority of arcade games ever made. But I am sure most
of the audience will be up in arms by now, so calm the fuck down,
you goddamn ignorant pricks, get back to your seats, and pay attention to what the real expert is about to say to you now - at any
rate as much attention as your Homer Simpson-like attention spans
will allow you.
VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I
It is at this point, thery that we must introduce a genealogy of scoring systems in aideogames - if not an extremely detailed and com-
prehensive one (which I am anyway temperamentally unsuited

to provide), at the very least a brief one - in order to understand
where the concept of scoring came from, what needs it was invented to satisfy, and finally whether or not those needs remain releoant
today, or whether they have in fact been irrelevant FOR DECADES,
and are by now merely an archoism that is HINDERING the advancement of the artform.
Scoring in games, then, began with games llke Spacewar (not
Spacewar itsell which featured no HUD elements at all, but many
of its immediate descendants, such as Pong and the like) which required it in order to connect together and lend continuity to their
extremely brief matches, and thus render the tiny little worlds in
which these games took place a little more lasting, solid, and thus
believable. What happened there was essentially the exact same
thing that happens with traditional team sports like basketball,
volleyball, football and whathaveyou. The moment people stop
keeping score in games like these all player interest goes out the
window, and the game becomes boring and practically unplayable.
Because what scoring does is that it lends increasing weight to successive phases of the game by, on the one hand having its outcome
being depended on the many little outcomes of previous phases,
and on the other the entire match riding on any given phase (as
long as both teams stay competitive throughout the entire match,
which is why matches in which any given team becomes dominant
early on have boring later phases), instead of the slate being simply wiped clean with every single point, effectively rendering all
player actions and decisions irrelevant beyond a couple of minutes.
This, thery was how the first generation of scoring systems
worked: the same way traditional games have always worked,
and that, as we have seen, made a hell of a lot of sense. The second generation, now was an entirely different beast. In games like
Breakout and Space lnoaders, which followed soon after Spacewar and
dropped the versus model to go for the more convenient and cinematic single-player experience (more convenient, since there was
no requirement for a second player to participate in order for the
game to work, and more cinematig since the deeply anti-cinematic
phase repetition of the versus model was done away with), the pur344
pose of scoring was something else entirely. The purpose of scorirrg in those games was to give the player the sense that he was actudly accomplishing something. Because you have to understand that
proper stage progression had not yet been invented, and the very
lirst moments of a single-player game looked, and to a great extent
cven felt (aside from the effects of increasing difficulty), practically
iclentical to the last
- if the game had an ending point at all, which
rnany of them didn't, rendering the score even more necessary. The
rationale for second generation scoring systems then, was to provide the player with some tangible metric of his progress in the
gameworld, and to enable him to easily compare his performance
lretween sessions. It was, once more thery a necessary function, and
therefore one that still made perfect sense.
Comes thre third generation of games, where proper stage progression has finally arrived and quickly become firmly established,
,rnd where players have become so enamored with it that any game
that doesn't feature it is more or less guaranteed to fail, with stuff
like Pnc-Man playing the role of transitional titles between the two
generations, since, though they did feature distinct stages, these
were hardly that distinct, thereby still necessitating some kind of
progress-indicating score. But by the time we get to Contra and Ro/littg Thunder, r:te.ver mind stuff l\ke Strider Hiryuu, Daimakqimura and
l'inal Fight, no one is quite sure what purpose the score is supposed
to be playing anymore, or paying much attention to it at all. And
I ask: what is the point of scoring systems in such games? These
games are lengthy, single-player experiences, so that the "brief versus match" rationale is no longer relevant for them. At the same
time, they feature extremely varied, lush, and colorful stages,

llrat even sound differently! many of them indeed wildly messing, throughout the game's duration, even with the mechanics!
(with one stage being a side-view action one, for example, and the
very next a third-person shooting or racing one, or even a puzzle
stage, as in countless games of that era such as the original Contra,
Konami's Aliens (US and World versions) and Surprise Attack, and
('ven more from the home computer and console markets), so that
lhe player is at every moment acutely aware of his position in the
H,ameworld, and there's no way in hell he'll fail to notice when he's
rnanaged to make some progress. Doesn't that mean that scoring
Iras finally become useless and irrelevant?
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VIDEOGAME CUTTURE: VOLUME I
Strictly-speaking, and in theory, yes, but in practice not quite so.

There still remain a couple of largely valid reasons for such games
to feature a scoring system, though ideally they should not. Let's
examine these reasons, then, and try to understand exactly why
this is so.
Firstly, you have to understand that we're still talking mainly
about arcade (or arcade-inspired) games here, and that arcade
games, in general, have always been, and thank God they still are,
extremely difficult, the most common consequence of which is that
players often get stuck at various points in them, being obliged to
replay them dozens if not hundreds of times in order to overcome
them. This can have an adverse effect on the "sense of progress"
issue we've discussed, an effect which the scoring system can help
somewhat mitigate by rewarding the player with little score increases at regular intervals, thus giving him at least some sense
of advancemen! and thereby contributing to keeping his interest
alive throughout all the time necessary to achieve more tangible
progress. (E.g" "Damn third boss stomped me agairy but hey, at
least I got a few more points this time!")
Secondly, and more importantly, scoring systems provide the
player with an extra reason to keep playing the gamg even after he
has finished it (or "cleared" it, as the more technical parlance would
have it). "Now why would a player wish to do that?') would be a
very good question here, especially by crap players who've never cleared anything (or who "clear" erserything with their absurd
game- and immersion-demolishing credit-feeding habits) and players with bad taste. Well, you see, the reason a player might want
to do that is because, surprise surprise, games, much like everything else in existence, ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL, and some of
them are so amazingly, astonishingly, awe-inspiringly superior to
all the rest, that setting them aside eaen after one has played them
for the weeks and months required to clear them, and going back
to the utter dreck, or even humdrum decent games, that most other
games are in comparison, can be a huge, and in some cases even
unbearable letdown. Of course, one could replay a game even if it
had no scoring system, but the scoring makes the experience far
more meaningful, with the term "meaningful" here being employed
in the exact same way I have defined it in my Genealogy, as "having
an appreciable mechanical impact on the gameworld') this impact
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here bein9, of course, the little numbers that change usually at the
top-center or top-right corner of the screen.
-'A pitiful little impact
that is!') a smart reader would now chip in, and I would heartily
agree (and also add, moreover, that bonus lives aside it is usually a
mostly aesthetic impact not a mechanical one, as we'll be seeing in
detail shortly, so it's really not that meaningful), but it's still better
than nothing, dude! It's still better than the gameworld responding
to your actions the exact same goddamn way it did before, creating
therefore the impression in you of participating in apreprogrammed,
clockwork-mechanical world, in other words a barren, a dead world,
and therefore a boring and ultimately depressing one.
Notice that we are still talking about largely linear action games
here, not about games that feature a great deal of exploration, or
tactical/strategy games and the like, all of which have much usider
possibility spaces, which is why they lend themselves much more

readily to being replayed, even after one has finished them, and
why they therefore practically never feature scoring systems, and
rightly so. But in games such as R-Type or Metal Slug, which are
the kind of stuff I am for the moment confining the discussion
tq there still remains at least a sliaer of rationale for scoring. And
why "a sliver') one may ask? Because the only reason for the scoring system at this poinl is practical. Because the only reason is that
there simply do not currently exist (or, at least, did not exist at and
around the time of their release - because today they almost do)
enough masterpieces at the level of these two games to keep a good
player occupied with clearing a continuous string of them, instead
of being forced to regularly "lower" himself to second-rate efforts
and cheap imitators. People like Josh here understand me perfectly; Josh, who has not only cleared Metal Slug probably more times
than he remembers, and then proceeded to play the fuck out of its
scoring system to finally begin achieving world-class scores, but
having nearly exhausted even the scoring system's possibilities,
has even gotten to the point of devising arbitrary goals for himself,
such as for example trying to clear the game with the least number
of jumps, or without pressing the up or down directions (lol), or by
imposing other increasingly esoteric, and sometimes even seemingly retarded constraints on himself (performing pirouettes every
other screen or whatever, I don't know). The man is simply utterly
in love with the charmingly cartoonish little world that Nazca's
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VTDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I
master craftsmen have created, can find no other game in its genrc
that quite matches it, and is therefore doing everything he can to
prolong his stay in it as much as possible. It is a really touching
sentiment, ar:rd, though my love for Metal Slug pales in comparison
to his (it's undeniably a great game, but Id take one of the better
Contras any day over a Metal Slug), I can still fully relate to what
he's feeling, having felt similarly myself for a number of other titles.
I can still remember the first time this happened to me, the day I
finally beat Defender of the Crown, an achievement which brought
absolutely no joy to me but an inexplicable emptiness and sadness.
And next thing I remember there I was, having almost beaten it

again, obscenely overpowered yet leaving one tiny enemy kingdom
alone, needlessly building up my own kingdoms for hours, swatting away the A.I. opponent's regular attempts at a feeble counterattack, but withouf finishing him off; toying with him iust to feel as
if I was still inside the gameworld, still accomplishing something
a strategy
title, didn't even have scoring!
But this is ultimately a retarded way to Proceed, and the experience of playing the game like this is a much degraded one, which
is why after one or two sessions like the above I gave up on Defender of the Crown, and moved on. You even destroy the world you
love, by treating it in such a manner, the wonder it contains, or
at least once contained for you, your very memories of it, etc., by
replaying it and exploring every nook and cranny of it so obsessively (which by the way is why the ultimate game would be one
that, among other things, could never be replayed, wink-wink), ultimately eliminating every last trace of mystery from it, and finally
arriving at roughly the same result as the aspies do with their tiny,
barren mediocre shit-games and their neat little piles of stats and
numbers. And all of this is reflected in the fact that, whereas my
first memories of Defender of the Crown, pre-cleaL are all wonderful and absolutely unforgettablg the few hours I spent with it after clearing it are a rather distasteful, even somewhat depressing
memory. Only the fact that I can finally now benefit from them by
using them to relate with people like ]osh and understand them
better, am I able to salvage them and call them good. Otherwise I
am thankful that I've had enough intelligence and money to keep
finding, throughout my life, more and more great games, and an
that mattered. And the goddamn game, being essentially
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extremely wide range of tastes so that I can appreciate and enjoy

practically all genres (even sports games, puzzle games and JRPGs, believe it or not, though I draw the line at rhythm games and
MMOs), whereas Josh and people with similarly narrow tastes are
forced to stay within the couple of genres they prefer, and are thus
doomed to interminably obsess over the small number, really a

handful, of masterpieces they contain (whictr, by the way, though
an ultimately inferior attitude, is still infinitely superior to that of
the "I love everything" rabble, who can't distinguish between shit
and pure gold, and *no believe that all artwJrks are equal, and
hence deserve an equal amount of attention).
So ultimately, as I have plainly demonstrated and hope everyone will have realized by now, there is absolutely no reason for postPac-Man era games to feature scoring systems, since the two objections I elaborated above, though understandablg are ultimately
weak and negligible. If you are stuck in some game somewhere,
either man up and give it yet another lry, or take a fucking break
and return to it when you feel the desire to do so; and if you've
finally cleared your favorite game, and feel sad at the thought of
saying goodbye to its wonderful little world and putting it away,
you are better off holding back the tears and investing all of that
sobbing energy ittto finding and playing tnore great games (and why
not, perhaps also replaying that game you cleared once a year or
sq just like you do with your favorite movies
- but no more than
a couple of times a year).
But of course things are not quite so simple, since I've only so
far tackled games with fairly straightfornsard scoring systems (such
as R-Type or Metal Slug), i.e. with systems where the score increases
roughiy proportionately with stage progressiory as practically all
scoring systems worked before the arrival of the modern STG era
all natural scoring systems.
- i.e.
Things change however, and they change radically, with the introductiory starting in the early- and mid-'9Os, of a range of mainly
sl'rooting titles by companies such as Cave, Raizing, Takumi and
others, which begin to feature increasingly esoteric and convoluted scoring systems, systems where the score finally disentangles
itself from stage progression to such an extent, that players who've
cleared a game can find themselves outscored by aspie gimps who can
barely get half-way through if, thereby contributing to raising an en-
tire generation of players who do not seem at all concerned with

clearing a game (i.e. with frlly experiencing it), but who downright
frown upon this experience, and instead purport to Play, as they
call it, "for score" (a practice which, though it began as mentioned
in the STG world, eventually trickled down to many other genres/
where, as we shall see, it makes eaen less sense). All of these people
are so far gone inside the wonderful little world of aspieism, that
they will laugh this essay away straight from the very title (which
is why I chose it lol), but that is no reason for us not to analyze
their iavorite games and their behavior, and find out exactly what's
wrong with both of them.
There are two ways, therefore, to approach this problem: from
the perspective of the games, and that of the players. I think we'd
have an easier time of it if we got through the psychology of the
players first, so let's begin with that.
The key point to grasp in the psychology of these "players" then
(and you will shortly understand the reason for the scare quotes), is
that when the aspies say that they are playing, for example, Dodonpachi, they are not really playing Dodonpachi at all. Or they are playing it, but only in an extremely limited, secondary sense. Because
the game they are in fact playing is a completely different game,
a game in which Dodonpachi plays the role of merely a mini-game,
and which, in the worst of cases (i.e. in the most autistic aspies),
could be easily substituted with another game with hardly anyone)
noticing.
Let's make this extremely plain and explicit then: the goal in any
game with stage progression is to reach the end. Simple as that. If
there is a scoring system, its nature is obviously strictly secondary,
since no matter what score you reach, the game doesn't end until the
stages do (a fact which the phenomenon of counter-stopping triumphantly validates, by the way, since the designers, and therefore
the game, obviously don't give a shit what happens to the counter
since the game proceeds as normal, whereas the other way around,
i.e. the score continuing to count after you've finished the game lol,
never actually happens).
But the goal in the game the aspies are playing is not to reach the
end of the videogame, BUT TO ACHIEVE THE TOP SLOT ON THE
SCOREBOARD irrespective of how far in the game they've progressed, and moreover not simply to achieve it once and be done
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with it, but to also HOLD ON TO THAT SLOT
FOR AS LONG AS
THEY CAN, ACAINST THE CONTINUAL ATTACKS ON THEIR
POSITION BY THE REST OF THE ASPIES (- a scoreboard which,
moreover, and we'll return to this point shortly, IS LOCATED OUTSIDE OF THE VIDEOGAME). That ts the game the aspies are playing, and whether the mini-game being employed to facilitate this
grand game is Dodonpachi or Baftle Garegga, Ikaruga or Death Smiles,
or any other videogame, ultimately makes little difference, since
the main features of the grand game (i.e. the scoreboard-climbing
antics and all the techniques and methods that pertain to it, in the
form of credit-feeding to improve quicker, watching superplays,
exchanging strategies, stealing secrets, etc., even decompiling and
analyzing the videogame's aery code - not to mention pure and
simple cheating in a variety of forms, from hacking the game to
score falsification, etc.) remain unaltered.
And the burning question now, before we move on to and concern ourselves with the details or anything else, is: "Is the grand
game the aspies are playing better or worse than the mini-game they
have reduced the videogame to?" Now if one considers that the first
effect of the credit-feeding/superplay-watching/strategy-exchanging/code-analyzing or plain simply cheating fagotries that form fhe
core of the aspies' game is to strip all the aesthetics away from the
poor hapless little videogame they are so happily and blissfully engaged in butchering; all the wonder, the mystery, the tensiory the
discovery of the unknown, i.e. all the ILLUSION, all the ART away
from it finally reducing it to a mere exercise in thumb-twiddling
and button-pushing, one realizes that the aspies might as well be
playing darts or ping-pong and they wouldn't know the difference,
and we can safely say that, at least from an art criticism and art
theory perspective, the game they are playing is not simply worse
but AN ABOMINATION. The very fact that all these activities,
from the very scoreboard all the way down to the little brouhaha
that follows the discovery of every single new trick or high-scoring
technique, not to mention the code-analyzingand the cheating, occur OUTSIDE OF THE VIDEOGAME, means that the dimension
of immersion (immersion inside the gameworld, not inside the aspie
nsylum) has been demolished
- and immersiory as I have shown in
my Genealogy, is the very essence of art, the very ynrdstick by which
to measure and evaluate it. One has only to consider that the first
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thing they tell you in aspie school to do on getting your hands on

a new game is to credit-feed it right away, read all existing strategy
guideJand watch all superplays, otherwise you can forget about
6eing "competitive') since you'll be immediately at an immense, essentially unbridgeable disadvantage to everyone else.
Thiithen, toiut this short and move on with the subject of aspie psychology, is what the aspies do to the aesthetic, the artistic
hi..,-e.,sion oi the game, to finally utterly demolish it, leaving buhind only the mechanical part, which they exalt and on which they
lavish ali their attention. And now the question is why? Why do
they act in such a strange and utterly absurd manner, and why do
normal people act so differentlY?
In shbrt,-it is the competitiae streak in the aspies, combined with
their generally wretched physical condition and miserly, pathetic
little life-experiences, which cause them to look for recreational
competitionin videogames, i.e. in art, as oPPosed to where normal,
healthy people look for it, which is to say in sports (which is still, by
the way, better than what the artfags do, who do not look for comPetition inywhere at all, neither in games nor game design, and indeed
do everything in their Power to arsoid it, all the while being unconscious mastei manipulators by convincing everyone else that they
and their games are nevertheless superior in everything - but I
have already covered all of that at length in my Genealogy. The
point here anyway is that the aspies, however low_they may stand
in the order oi rank of lifeforms in general, and videogame players
in particular, still tower immeasurably over the artfags.)
'And why'', one who still hasn't the faintest clue as to the nature of videogames and art may ask at this point, "is it healthier
to indulge one's desire for recreational competition in s-ports instead ofln videogamesfart?" Because the very nature of art, and
therefore of videogames, my dear stupid, ignorant friend, is cere'
bral, whereas Sports are defined as games which feature a major
physical component, which is why games like Risk or Monopoly are
noi categori2ed as sports, and even stuff like darts, billiards and
ping-pong, which ale regarded as sports by some, are looked down
bn witf, contempt and derision by real athletes. The aspies then,
exactly because they've never experienced the thrill of competition
in the context of a real sport, find the virtual kind, the "cyber"sport
as it is laughably known, so engrossing. For competition is inher'
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it makes a difference whether one is competing in thumb wrestling or kickboxing. And if real athletes refuse
to categorize as a sport fucking darts, which involve the use not
only of one's entire arm, but a great part of the torso as well, how
much more so some goddamn little videogame, some asinine little
"cyber"sport, which barely involves a couple of goddamn fingers!
The very idea of "cybersports" is pathetic, utterly retarded, and it is
no accident that women are so strongly attracted to real athletes
while finding "cyber"athletes downright comica4 it is simply their
way of contributing to the preservation, and ideally the increase, of
the health and strength of our species. For God save mankind if the
aspies, these so-called "cyber"athletes, ever started reproducing in
ently engrossing, but
great numbers!
What the aspies are basically doing, thery is throwing themselves headfirst into ruthless airtual competition, while in the
process copying over all their tactics (training regimes, coaching,
videos, strategy guides; even cheathrg) from the athletics world. But
let's try to grasp the cosmic extent of the stupidity in what they are
doing: in sports, in stark contrast to videogames, the reason people
go to such lengths to improve in them is because the goal of the
training sessions is actunlly worth nchieabry, for it is valuable in itself, which is why it is pursued so relentlessly, and via all available
means; because pleasure in sports comes from physical exertiott which is precisely where health and strength come from! - which
is why the finaI, desired state in a sport is a supreme pleasure. But
the final state of a videogame is nothing of the kind. To be the fastest swimmer in the world is a supremely desirable state, but to
be the best Counter-Strike player means nothing. In the first case
it means you can swim like a fucking fish, and I cannot possibly
communicate with mere words to you this godly feeling, which,
like all supremely valuable feelings, NEEDS TO BE EXPERIENCED
IN ORDER TO BE UNDERSTOOD (which is why the aspies know
nothing of them), whereas in the second case all it means is that
you can just click and move a mouse around faster than a bunch
of other aspies, a feat which, in itself, gives no pleasure at all (and
therefore no health and no strength). The pleasure in the latter case
comes from the ILLUSION (i.e. from THE ART) that you are a top
terrorist or counter-terrorist (whereas in fact you are nothing of the
kind, which is why we call it illusory), running around industrial
environments and gunning people down with M16s and AK-47s,

whereas in the sport THERE'S NO ILLUSION (pace Baudrillard,
by the way, and his nihilistic dribble about "the illusion of performance"); all pleasure comes from the actual task. The aspies are
basically dearly confused; because of their miserable little life-experiences they have confused real pleasure, which is worth pursuing with all one's enthusiasm and energy, and pouring one's entire
life into it, with the illusory, artistic kind, which is meant as merely
a kind of relaxation, a refreshing little fantasy (more or less exactly
as with a dream), worth indulging in while recuperating between
sessions of REAL exertion. And then of course the "cyber"athletics
stupidity arrives and throws mlney in the equation to confuse
things eaen further, with the end result being doubly harmful: with
people doing, not only things they shouldn't be doing, but which
they eventually come to not even enjoy doing - for the money, of
course - as do all those who allow their lives to be guided by the
prerogatives of the slave society. And the immense irony in all this
is that the proponents of the cyber"athletics" stupidity cite precisely
money as the aspect that's supposed to redeem and elevate these
pseudo-sports in everyone's eyes! "LOOK IT'S MAKING MONEY
SO IT MUST BE GOOD!" - So does PROSTITUTION, fuckface, but
what does that mean? That we should turn our sisters and daughters into whores?
But none of this registers in the aspies' tiny brains, who thanks
to them basically live entire tracts of their lives in an utterly upsidedown world, revering as extremely manly and "gods" theii wretch-
ed little stick-wiggling and mouse-clicking top-scoring brethren,

whilst regarding as weaklings mediocre scorers, like me for instance, regardless of the fact that I regularly surf 10-foot slabs and
drop 20-foot cliffs on snowboards and mountain bikes, and could
probably smash the faces in of an entire fucking scoreboard of aspies
at the sfiftte time.
So, to say it once again, just to ensure it sticks in at least a few
people's brains, the physical act of clicking the mouse or raiggling a stick
around giaes practically no pleasure at all, EXCEPT PERHAPS TO A
QUADRIPLEGIC (see, for example, Stephen Hawking), whereas the

act of swimming like Michael Phelps, or anywhere near him, is an
incomparablg indescribable utterly exhilarating experience (which
if you havent experienced it take my word for it: my 100m freestyle
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high score stands currently at 1:07, compared to Phelps's 47.57, so I

know what I am talking about). The ultimate value of videogames,
therefore, resides in their aesthetics, in the virtual, i.e. the FAKE
journey, whilst the mechanics, i.e. the REALITY of mouse-clicking
or stick-wiggling merely facilitate that journey, by the more ffictiae
DELIVERY of the aesthetics; delivering them more directly, more
believably, more realistically - and therefore more enjoyably; and it
is precisely that journey which you are UTTERLY DEMOLISHING
with all your aspie pseudo-athletic tactics, whose ultimate aim is
not to increase the effectiveness of the illusion, by to outperform in
stick-wiggling and mouse-clicking some other random aspie!
And there's more to it than that, for why should we not get to
the bottom of this after we've already come so far? Basically, the
entire idea of sports, as it evolved from the ancients, and especially
supremely by the Greeks, who apotheosized them in their Olympic Games, is as a preparation for u)Ar, a mostly bodily preparatiory
since war, at least as it is experienced by the vast majority of participants, is a mostly physical affair. The mental side is also important and cultivated (and that's the only genuinely good thing
to come out of so-called "competitive" gaming; this overly aggressive, warlike attitude, involving challenges, wagers, threats, taunts,
trash-talking and the rest), but plays a far smaller, secondary role
to physical preparatiory and is anyway necessarily also developed
in the course of it. Eaen sports, then, were ultimately never meant
as valuable activities in themselaes, but only as a means of breeding
better warriors (stronger, faster, more enduring, more loyal, obedient and co-operative (the so-called "team spirit"); and to a lesser
extent smarter, since intelligence clashes somewhat with the obedience and co-operation priorities), all of which has been deeply ingrained by now in the course of countless millennia in our cultures
and instincts, which is why we regard (American) football, rugby,
basketball players and the like
- and of course supremely boxers
and other martial artists
with
such respect and awe, whereas
it's so difficult to take seriously, say baseball or tennis players or
golfers or whatever, since they are essentially the athletics world's
equivalent to our very own videogame aspies, having confused,
either through the money incentive or pure weakness and stupidity,
once more the means for the ends, and coming at length to display
such absurd enthusiasm and zeal in their retarded little quest to
355
in the world at, for example, guiding a tiny little

plastic ball with a little metal rod into some random hole in the
ground or whatever, which skill could not possibly have any practical application in everyday life, let alone in war, and which doesn't
even contribute to the increase of the so-called "athlete's" health, let
alone his strength, or feel good in any way whatsoever apart from
whatever pitiful little amount of satisfaction one can get by outperforming other aspies in their metal-rod-swinging shenanigans,
exactly as with cyber"sports", or perhaps even u)orse since with stuff
like golf there's not even any illusion involved, and thus neither the
cerebral pleasure associated with it.
I mean, are we seriously supposed to regard this "Tiger" Woods
character as some kind of top athlete? or Counter-Strike as a sport?
I mean what's next, knitting? "YES! I DID IT! I AM THE BEST IN
THE WORLD AT STRIKING THIS LITTLE RUBBER BALL WITH
THIS LITTLE WOODEN BAT AND THEN MAKING A NEAT LITTLE CIRCUIT ROUND THIS LITTLE RECTANGULAR PATCH OF
CRASS!" - Congratulations, fuckface! Now hurry up and gather
your shit because your bus is leaving.
Sports, thery and especially little fagety sports, such as baseball or golf or tennis, are inherently pathetic, how much more so
rsideogames when viewed as sports (instead of as art, which is what
they are), which are sports only to an absolutely tiny degree; precisely the degree to which physical action is involved. If an athlete
then, is a small man compared to a real warrior, a cyber"athlete" is a
fucking absolutely TINY man which once more makes women's
scorn towards them fully understandable, and even laudable, as
we've already seen, since it contributes to keeping men more manly.
Even the most fagety little pseudo-sport, then, even fucking pingpong or badminton, is ten times more physicalty intense than any
so-called "cybersport" when played at a similar level. of course the
latter has the advantage of illusion, so even though from a physical
standpoint it's less demanding/impressive than the fagety sports,
on a mental level it's infinitely superior. But the option doesn't have
to be between fucking ping-pong and Counter-Strike;you can just as
well choose basketball or snowboarding and Far Cry the former
of which are infinitely more physically demanding (and therefore
more pleasurable andhealthy) than ping-pong, and the latter infinitely more immersive (and therefore once again more pleasurable, and
become the best
3s6
as I have been explaining here also healthier) than Counter-Strike (as

will also see at length in my upcoming reviews of these gamet
tl
we
but which any half-way intelligent gamer should have already at

least FELT while playing them, if not indeed also figured out all
the reasons why by now). To practically demolish then the physical dimension (sport), and the illusory one (art), in order to play a
botched bastard abortion of both like Courter-Strike "at a competitive level" is a travesty - you'd have to be either quadriplegic or
Korean to do that.
But let's bring this lengthy denunciation of cyber"sports" to a
close on a lighter note, by making clear that, despite all the negativity I've seemingly heaped so far upon them in this article (really,
upon their practices), I nevertheless do not, under any circumstances,
begrudge the aspies their little StarCrafts or Counter-Strikes, and
their love of shooting each other in the back in the same little collection of boxy little rooms for months and years on end or whatever, any more than I begrudge dogs for loving the fuck out of and
playing " fetch" their entire liues. This article, after all, just as everything else I have written and will go on to write, is meant neither for
dogs nor aspies, and just as I am perfectly huppy to pat my dog on
the back while telling him'good doggie, good" after a particularly
enthusiastic little session of "fetch') I am perfectly willing to pat
an aspie on the back and tell him "good aspie, good') after a particularly competitive little session of StarCraft or Counter-Strike.For
what one must ultimately understand, to sum up our psychological
lesson for the day, is that there's nothing illogical or absurd in the
behavior of either dogs or aspies, and that it's only natural for small
creatures to prefer and find their happiness in small things and
small experiences. The main thing, thery is not to denounce, never
mind hate these small creatures, but not to cottfuse ourselaes with them
(and therefore our way of life, preferences and values), for aspies no
more deserve our hatred or contempt than dogs do; if they deserve
anything at all, just like our dogs, beyond perhaps our love and
understanding (especially if they are particularly cute little dogs or
aspies), lt is our pity.
But this has been a rather lengthy detour from our analysis of the
scoring debacle (though a necessary orre, since the cyber"athletics"
fagotry is nothing other than the culmination, the ultimate conclusion of the scoring fagotry), so let's get back to that.
i
I
And it is precisely at this point, having concluded our analysis

of aspie psychology, that we can best turn to and understand its
effects on the games these people prefer, demand, and praise. The
entire issue unravels once one realizes that all games have "scoring" systems of one sort or another, EVEN THOSE THAT DO NOT
APPEAR TO DO SO. (If this statement seems absurd to you go and
re-read the "RPG conundrum" essay, paying particular attention to
what I explain about stats, and then come back here.) When you
punch or kick an enemy in something llke Another World, for instance, or some other of those countless European home computer
games of the 8- and 16-bit eras which don't feature scoring (essentially the only aspect of those games in which they trump their )apanese counterparts), the game is nevertheless scoring your performance regardless of whether or not you actually see a score. And if you
manage to score high enougln, your reward is not a pathetic little
number on the screen, but the death of the enemy, and the opening-up
to you of the path he had been blocking. And it's the same with every
videogame ever made, 2D or 3D action or turn-based, all of which
essentially feature scoring systems, systems which in technical videogame parlance are more commonly known as "MECHANICS".
What the aspies call a "scoring system') therefore, is nothing other
than a mere subset of a game's REAL scoring system - its mechanics - an additional set of mechanics that translates your motions
into a number, that quantifies your motions, not for any in-game
purpose (that of setting obstacles in your path and thus regulating
your progress in the gameworld, as the rest of the mechanics), but
for an out-of-game purpose: the comparison with other players. For
the score in "proper" scoring systems (i.e. stuff like arcade games;
not the orbs, say, in Deail Moy Cry) is never meant for in-game use,
as the "score" of the main mechanics is; on the contrary, it's given
to you at the very end, precisely at the point when you are about to
leave the game; essentially once you've already left. But for a game
to be as immersive, i.e. as engrossing and involving as possible,
ideally nothing should ever leave it. The more stuff leaves the game
THE WORSE THE GAME IS. In the ultimate game nothing would
ever leave, not even the player.
In games too, unlike the real, there is nothing left over. Because they
have neither history, memory nor internal accumulation (the stakes are
358
constantly being consumed and reversed, it being an unspoken rule

that, while the game is in progress, one cannot withdraw anything
in the form of a gain or "surplus value"), they leave no residue within.
Nor is there anything that remains outside the game. The "remainder"
supposes an unsolved equation, an unrealized destiny, something subtracted or repressed. But a game's equation is always perfectly balanced,
and its destiny always fulfilled, without leaving any traces... (Jean Bau-
drillard,
Seduction)
These so-called "scoring mechanics", therefore, these "traces" of

what happened in the game - and this will be very difficult for
many people to grasp especially the poor deluded "scorers" - are
ultimately all of them bad mechanics. For if the aim of the main mechanics is to increase pleasure, which is to say hrgame pleasure, the
aim of the "scoring" mechanics is to increase out-of-game pleasure,
by serving as mechanics in the real game the aspies are playing: the
"king of the scoreboard" game. These scoring mechanics are therefore systematically siphotting off pleasure from inside the gameworld and redirecting it outside, thereby resulting, in all cases and
with no exceptions, inworse games.
"But I still love scoring in some games!') the more sympathetic,
less malignant aspies will by now be desperately protesting, "Some
of my best experiences with games have been by struggling against
their scoring systems!" - Only because you are playing BADLYMADE games, and lack the critical ability, breadth of knowledge
and experience, powers of abstraction and conceptualizing, etc.
to realize HOW MUCH BETTER even THE BEST of your favorite
score-including games would have turned out had they had their
scoring mechanics removed and replaced by proper mechanics.
Consider, for example, Hiroshi Iuchi's and Treasure's famous shooter lkaruga, of which Tsuneki Ikeda, Cave's mastermind and king of
the convoluted scoring system had to say, "I'm never going to be a
genius that can make a game llke lkaruga". You think he didn't really mean this compliment? Does it sound to you like mere flattery?
lkaruga is indeed a genius videogame (and Ikeda, like the master
artist that he is, feels this on a gut level, even if he can't explain it)
precisely because it achieved the complexification of the mechanics
of a shooter, not by forcing the player to perform random, arbTtrary
pirouettes every other screen or whatever, but by doing something
that made sense in the context of the gameworld. There was, of course,
also the chaining, which served as the inevitable scoring system,
but this was on the one hand of secondary importance compared to
the color-switching, and would anyway have been far more effective if it had done away with the score completely and functioned
as a power-up system of some kind, like for instance Psyoariar's; i.e.
with your reward for chaining being, not some random number on
the screen, but an actual in-gamebenefit. And there you would have it:
a game exactly as complex and demanding as lkaruga, but without
any "scoring" nonsense. And moreover, an eoen harder game than
Ikaruga, if you ramped up the difficulty to compensate for the extra
firepower the chaining player would gain, since it would demand
chaining from you to make progress comparable to what youd
make in the original game, instead of leaving it optional for those
who wanted to play "for score", siphoning off the extra difficulty
outside the gameworld, to help build some utterly retarded, immersion-demolishing scoreboard with it. But in any case the increase
in quality of even the stand ard lkaruga over all its brethren with
the absurdly convoluted scoring systems was so huge, so amazing,
so obvious, that even the casuals managed to see it, which is why
lkaruga is hailed as the best shooting game ever even by many who
can't even play it. It is the naturalness in lkaruga's mechanics, the
elegance, the beauty, to which the crowd is responding, and which
far outstrips such convoluted and aesthetically absurd piece-of-shit
scoring systems as those found in stuff llke Baftle Garegga or Mushihime-sama. That these last two games are still considered, and justly
considered, as masterpieces is not because of their scoring systems
but despite them, because the stages, enemy and bullet patterns,
art and musig pacing, difficulty, etc. are so insanely amazing and
finely-tuned. (But lkaruga still outstrips them, as a game anyway, if
not as a shooting game, which it is not quite because if you are any
good at it you hardly eaer shoot, but that's a subtle classification issue
of no importance to the present discussion, and one which I shall
anyway explore at length in the game's upcoming Videogame Art
review.) And the same applies to Psyrsariar and Shikigami no Shiro,
among a handful of other titles, where the genius application of the
grazing concept, first and foremost via the proper, main mechanics, elevates these games, at least mechanically, far above the majority of their contemporaryt and even modern competition, with their
360
mechanical excellence owing absolutely nothing to their secondary, and ultimately superfluous scoring systems. And then we see
the grazing concept being borrowed by tne Burnout team, and how
much more exciting that game ended up as a result than something
like Metropolis Street Racer and the pGR games, which achieve a
comparable complexification of mechanics through an attempt to
quantify style, with some success it must be noted, but with nowhere near the level of viscerality of a Burnout. Because the difference with Burnout is that the latter feeds the result of the complexifying mechanic right back into the game, into the very actionleven
though, as with Gun valkyrie and the grazing STGs,- the rationale
for this is perhaps not quite adequatelyixplained in terms of these
games' plots/settings, or not explained at all, which makes them
slightly less effective, from a holistic viewpoint, than they could
have been if it had been), whereas the Bizarre racers completely
abstract it, removing it from the immediate action and converting
it to a_currency with which the player can later "bry" new.u.s u.,d
unlock tracks - an approach which, though inferior to Burnout's,
is of course still superior to UTTERLY rem-oving it from the game
and handing it to the player to post it on some scoreboard f6r no
practical reason at all, but merely in the interests of exhibitionism.
"But we dont use the score for exhibitionism!') the reply will
straightaway come, "but in the interests of competition which

spurns everyone to invest more effort in the game, and the increased difficulty that results!"
- which is an extremely naive
objection that betrays the person voicing it has zero psychological
acumen, as well as having failed to understand much of anything
I've been explaining here. But the objection is anyway a valuabl6
one, because it betrays the key concept around wnicn the entire
debacle hinges: the concept, that is to say, of dfficutty, with the bad,
immersion-diminishing difhculty that the aspie scorers champion
coming from OUTSIDE the game (i.e., from the threat on one's
scoreboard position by other players), and moreover from REALITY from the mechanics; whilst the good, immersion-increasing difficuity- coming from INSIDE the game (i.e., from the player's dLsire
to explore
1nd exp-erience more of the gameworld), whith is to say
from the illusion, from the aesthetics.
And thus we finally arrive at the rationale (or at least the professed, widely accepted rationale) for the debacle that are the modern,
convoluted scoring systems, exemplified by Cave's shooters, and

the modern STG genre in general (which is why I'11 be focusing
my analysis on them), and to a lesser extent trickling down to and
infecting, unfortunately, also a number of other genres: difficulty.
Game developers, we are told, began creating these systems, purely and simply, to make their games tnore difficult. Now whether they
actually succeeded in this or nof i.e. whether games llke Death Smiles
are actually more difficult than games like R-Type (when played, of
course, "for score"), is an issue that will not concern me here; suffice
it to say that, though the casuals generally think so, many expert
players disagree, at least in many cases, and if their objections are
correct this would of course indicate that, at least in those cases,
and if this was indeed their goal, the developers have failed.But, as
I will be explaining now even in such cases, they have succeeded
in another respect complexification, or at least apparent complexification. Because, even if we agreed (and I am by no means saying that
I agree, or even that I am qualified to make such a judgement, a
judgement which is anyway largely irrelevant for the purposes of
the current discussion) that R-Type and Death Smiles are of equal, or
at least of comparable difficulty, they are most certainly not equal
in terms of complexity (or at least apparent complexity): R-Type's
scoring mechanics can be more or less explained in a couple of sentences, whereas Death Smiles'could take entire pages. So essentially,
what happened in the early- and mid-'9Os with the games of Ikeda,
Nakamura, Yagawa and co., was that shooting games had arrived
at a point where their possibilities had been explored to such an extent that, if they wanted to remain shooting games, i.e. if they didnt
want to alter their rules so much as to cross over into some other
genre and thus lose the right to be classified as shooting games,
they had to start experimenting with wildly abstract, unnatural mechanics. (And what is an unnatural mechanic? You should have
figured that out by now: One that makes no sense in the context of
the gameworld, i.e. one that isn't perfectly explained in terms of its
aesthetics). After all, there's only so much you can do when working within the parameters of a single-plane gameworld in which
the player's avatar is a sprite shooting small sprites at other sprites
while dodging those last sprites' own little sprites, and perhaps
also a few immobile obstacles. For how many games, after all, are
players expected to stomach in which they are basically moving left
362
to right (or bottom to top or diagonally as in Zaxxon or Viewpoint

or whatever) and shooting everything in sight while dodging the
return hre? Gradias mixed things up by introducing options, R-Type
via the Force, side Arms with bidirectional shooting, and so on and
so forth
- and all of these where more or less perfectly natural mechanics. But after hundreds, if not thousands of such games, even
the most experienced, talented developers, even the ones right on
the cutting edge were basically running out of new ideas, at which
point - surprise surprise - the unnatural mechanics began appearing! For what after all, is the rationale for chaining in the Donpachi games? What the fuck difference does it make what order I
shoot the enemies in, as long as I get rid of them? If they are dead
they are dead, and as far the gameworld is concerned that's all that
matters! - never mind the "hidden bees" and other similar retardations! To be sure, I am rewarded for these absurd, textbook-autistic
behaviors with a "higher score", but bonus lives aside (to which
we'll return shortly), what the fuck am I supposed to do with your
fucking retarded higher score? Mastering the use of the options in
Gradius, or the Force in R-Type, or the bidirectional mechanics in
Side Arms not only made perfect sense in the context of their respective gameworlds, but were moreover essential in progressing
further within them, i.e. in fully exploring them, in clearing them
which is a linear action game's entire point!
and motherfucking
Ikeda and co. (which is to say the specialist-STG developers that began appearing in the early- and mid-'90s), because they couldn't figure out how to devise and keep adding similar mechanics to their
games, because they finally became unable of thinking up ways
of complexifying their games along the lines that Konami's, Irem's
and Capcom's designers had established, took the scoring system,
which had anyway as we've seen become obsolete long before, and
was being retained and carried on from game to game for the exact same reason it was being kept in fighting games (i.e. tradition,
something which the Japanese as a culture are seriously hung up
on, which is why genuine large-scale innovation is so rare in Japan,
and why there have never been any great ]apanese thinkers), and,
instead of trashing if as they should have done, elevated it to the aspect of primary importance! They zuere not smort enough to figure out
what they should be doing, and not tnlented enough to do it, and so they
took the easy way out, the first one that occurred to theru!And tha! dear
readers, is the fuIl truth of what happened, and the history of how
we got to where we are today. Complexification is, of course, the
only way forward for the shooting genre (indeed, as we have seen,
for any genre), but the moment a mechanic is introduced that the
designers cannot figure out how to somehow tie to the aesthetics,
it's fed into the scoring system, because otherwise nobody would
be retarded enough to pay attention to it - or even notice its existence! - not even the aspies.
It was not you see, just a matter of thinking up different systems
(which by itself would have already been hard enough past a certain point, when all the easy ideas had been exhausted, copied, and
slightly altered and modified in countless variations), but also of
complexifying them. For Gradius had the options, but R-Type had
the options AND the Force, and so on and so forth with all of their
descendants (or at least the ambitious ones, that craved to catch
the experts' attention - and back then everyone was an expert).
Otherwise, if simply tinkering with a single, autonomous system
would have sufficed, we'd still be playing variations of Space lnoaders today, and shooters wouldn't even feature scrolling,let alone
the numerous intricately interwoven (unfortunately mostly scoring)
systems of a Daifukkatsu. Moreover, it wasn't just the conceptual difficulty of dreaming up properly integrated mechanics that caused
Ikeda and co. to opt instead for purely arbitrary scoring ones, but
also the necessity of not utterly scaring away from the genre new
players, which the scoring debacle unfortunately facilitates, by providing two levels on which to play the game: the casual scrub level
(which is already, by the wd!, at least as far as the majority of arcade
shooters are concerned, tough enough), in which purely scoring
mechanics are ignored and the player just plows through the game
by concerning himself only with the NATURAL mechanics; and
the aspie scorer level, in which people with bad taste who reduce
videogames to numbers can challenge themselves for an extra few
weeks or months (or, for the more autistic among them, a few years).
A few hundred games further down that path, then, to continue with this sad and increasingly absurd little story, and there
appeared (to those at least, llke me, who were paying attention) to
be a natural tendency for increasingly elaborate scoring systems to
result in increasingly anti-natural player (or, more precisely aaatar)
behavior. For if a behavior is natural, the player will do it regard364
less of reward, so the reward becomes superfluous; and since all

players will perform, or at least striue to perform these behaviors,
there will be nothing differentiating their scores, rendering the
scoring system superfluous, since the aim of scoring and scoreboards is precisely differentiation. And this is why there's so little
score differentiation per stage in early shooting (and general action)
games, whose scoring systems were far simpler than today's, and
thus relatively natural, and why even the aspies rarely if ever play
these games "for score" - because they don't get much pleasure
out of them, since when all is said and done they all get the same
score. Now, the more you wish to provide that extra challenge to
these scoring "players') i.e. the more you wish to differentiate them,
the more difficult, and therefore convoluted stuff you have to ask
them to perform; but since this stuff is not tied in any way to the
game's aesthetics, the more convoluted it gets, the more weird, outof-place, and therefore anti-natural the behaviors will appear in the
context of the gameworld, and hence anti-immersiae (and hence anti-artistig and hence bad). Witness the vast majority of superplays,
which are not merely boring but basically unwatchable, because the
aspie playing the game is determined to search every goddamn

nook and cranny of every corner of the gameworld, or prolong boss
battles and other scenes way past the floint of dramatic satuiation
in order to "milk" a few more "points" from them (and speedruns
are just as dreadful to watch, by the wdlr by turning every game
into a Benny Hill skit, the only difference being that they ignore
the game's official score in favor of an unofficial one: the elapsed
time). Just the other day, to give an example, and a minor one at
thaf I tried watching one of Josh's superplays, of the Genesis Terminator game which he had just reviewed, and sure enough there
he was, jumping up and down five-six times in the very first screen
for no apparent reason at all, but presumably in the interests of
somehow amassing a few extra points. The game's entire attempt
to weave some sort of spell and draw you into its world had been
instantly shattered, from the very first screen, and the damn thing's
a shitty console game from 7992 that doesn't even have what the
aspies would term a "proper" scoring system! By the time you get
to stuff llke Espgaluda ll you've basically no idea at all why anything
is happening on screen, and the entire "shooting game" concept
has gone out the window and been effectively replaced by some
random action-puzzle gar:re with awesome aesthetics (a heirloom

of the REAL shooting games from which the game is descendent!),
which however do not make any fuckitlg sense.
And all this, by the wd!, to take a step back from the art world
and take another look at the athletics world, in order to expand our
viewpoint, is the exact same thing that happens with the modern,
so-called "alternative" sports, like skateboarding, snowboarding,
surfing, and the like, when people try to attach scoring to them and
treat them like traditional sports, only to result in boring competitions no one watches, while the best athlete is not the one on the
podium but the dude with the coolest movie parts who didn't even
bother competing. In rare circumstances the top stylist is also the
top champion, but again his most stylish performances were not
made in competition. It's not that there ISN'T any competition in
these sports, you understand, it's iust that this takes place OUTSIDE of scored events, IN THE WILDERNESS, where it is recorded
by professional filmmakers, to be later viewed and "scored" (via the
power of word-of-mouth and above all imitatiott) by all the other
pros and amateurs. Because the entire point in these sports (as in
a/l sports, though with the "alternative" ones it's even more Pronounced) is style, which could never be satisfactorily quantified,
since good style comes from within, whereas the score comes from
without, i.e. from attempting to reward the current cutting-edge
of style by referring back to older, already-established moves and
styles, which attempt of course clashes with the effort of the new
style to break forth from the athlete and materialize, and has a retarding, if not an outright retrogressive effect. If traditional sports,
thery are the equivalent of primitive, low-immersion videogames
such as Pong, Breakout, Space Inaaders, and the like, where a score is
more or less necessary to maintain player attention BECAUSE THE
GAME ITSELF IS IN THE LONG RUN RATHER BORING, the "a1ternative" sports are the equivalent of high-immersion videogames
with proper stage progression, where the game is as fascinating
and addictive AS A DRUG, and where the only thing you will accomplish by introducing scoring to it is to ruin It.
The main point then is that good style comes from within, and
therefore every demand from OUTSIDE will result in something
forced, anti-natural, and therefore ugly; and the GREATER the
demand, generally, the greater the anti-naturalness and ugliness.
366
ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPTES
Which is why superplays of older games are far more watchablg

on average, than those of modern games with complex scoring systems. Ultimately the designer must provide a gameworld that corresponds to your instincts, so that th-e best *or,i at every point will
also be the one you WANT to make, with stick-and-reward schemes
becoming not only superfluous but downright counter-productive,
and it is precisely the failure of much of modern gaming to DELIVER these worlds, or at least keep moving in THAT direction (an
understandable failure, of course, since it's by no means an easy
task, and with no theory to guide you you are bound to make every
conceivable mistake, and to keep making them), that has resulted
in so many anti-natural systemq and the resulting glorification of
aspieism in the cyber"athletics" fagotry, which as we have seen at
length is not only anti-artistic but unhealthy (both of which are anyway, if you have understood anything of NieEschean philosophy,
ultimately one and the same thing).
It is precisely, thery to move on with our analysis, and understand what's happening here to an even deeper level, because
games ALREADY have a natural scoring system, that a second one
will unavoidably clash with it, engendering, in the process, these
utterly unnatural behaviors, exemplified by the ridiculous antics of
superplay and speedrun players, which destroy the immersion in,
and therefore the artistic value of, a videogame. And it is precisely
from this clash that the increased difficulty (which we are told is
the scoring system's raison d'Atue, but which I am about to show that
it isn't), and hence the increased complexity and depth result. Remember, we are still talking about linear action games here, and
the linear action game has only one objective: to reach the end. The
moment you introduce ANY OTHER objective into it this will clash
with the main one, and it is from this clash" from the player's attempt to maximize his performance along the lines of BOTH objectives, that the game becomes harder, deeper and more complicated. For as everyone who's ever tried to play "for score" knows,
the more you aim for score the harder survival becomes, whereas
the more you prioritize survival the lower your scoring potential
will get. This can be sometimes seen in an especially absurd fashion in fighting games from Street Fighter onward, where, in contrast
to early versus stuff llke Pong, where there's only A SINGLE score,
and this naturally indicates the number of times each player has
won, there are TWO scores, one of which appears totally fucking
random and arbitrary, which you in fact have to fucking study to
see what it means, and it ultimately means nothing since you just
now had the higher score but nevertheless got your ass handed to
you by Daigo who walked away with the trophy. And similarly in
single-player games, where you just died on the third stage with all
the scrubs, instead of reaching the fourth one, but where instead of
being dejected about it you have a huge smile on your face because
you beat "the score" of some other random aspie
- which brings us
back to exhibitionism again, i.e. to you having a smile on your face
not because of what happened INSIDE the gameworld, but OUTSIDE of it.
''BLIT IT'S ABOUT DIFFICULTY NOT EXHIBITIONISM AND
YADDA YADDA YADDA' - BULLSHIT. Are you seriously trying
to tell me that scoring mechanics are the only way to increase a
game's difficulty? - never mind the bestl That Fatallty doesn't play
single-player FPSes because he finds them too easy? I've got news
for you sonny, ramp up the difficulty and A.I. of Max Payne or Far
Cry to superhuman levels and don't use the save feature and you'll
have a ruthless, nerve-racking game Fatallty will need to be playing for a decade to clear. Same with RTSes or anything fucking else,
and if this doesn't work keep stacking the opposition against you
until it does. The difficulty argument in favor of scoring systems
and scoreboards is UNTENABLE, and once it's been demolished
the only conceivable purpose left for them is exhibitionism pure and
simple, i.e. resctiae pleasure, pleasure derived from someone else's reaction - i.e. from SOMEONE ELSE LOSING, instead of active pleasure/ which is to say FROM YOU WINNING (i.e. from you having
a good time inside the gameworld, regardless of what anyone else
is doing).
But you don't understand what I am saying here? It's the exact
same thing we saw earlier with the illusory pleasure derived from
Counter-Strike domination, i.e. from moving around and clicking
a mouse faster than anyone else, instead of from competence in a
real sport, which doesn't even require any "official" competition to
be enjoyable (since the enjoyment in this case is anyway ultimately always derived from participation in the supreme competition:
that of the uniaerse's, whose "scoring system" is of course power, and
which the players become conscious of in the form of pleasure).
368
Same exact thing in this case, once one realizes that the mere act
OF PLACING YOUR NAME ON A BOARD GIVES NO PLEASURE
AT ALL, hence the pleasure can only come from HOW YOU FEEL
ABOUT THIS FACT, i.e. from the reaction of everyone else who sees
it (since the very point of scoreboards is for them to be seen by peo-
ple, and an empty scoreboard sitting in a vacuum by itself would

if you are still finding all this hard to
stomach, try the experiment of sticking up an empty scoreboard
on your wall and writing your name down in its top slot. What
pleasure could anyone possibly derive from such an act? More or
less the same as that derived by sitting in front of your computer
while it's turned off and moving the mouse around and clicking it
in the patterns of a top Counter-Strike player. That is how you realize that the pleasure derived from both these acts is reactioe in the
first case, and illusory rn the second, since the moment you remove
their raison d'Afue (the other aspies' scores in the first case, the aesthetics in the second) it simply vanishes. The same exact thing happens
in real life, to give a more tangible and hence easier to understand
example, with trophy wives and girlfriends; i.e. reactive pleasure
in BEING SEEN as the husband or boyfriend of a beautiful woman,
instead of active pleasurg which is quite simply FUCKINC HER,
and which has absolutely nothing to do with whether anyone else
saw you or not, or what everyone else may or may not be thinking.
And just look at how radically things change the moment you
decide to abandon the scoring concept, how much more instantly
rewarding and fulfilling the playing experience becomes, which is
why games llke Prince of Persia and Another World were so instantly
engrossing. The moment you remove those silly numbers from the
screen everyone can suddenly relax and pay attention to the atmosphere (and the reverse of course: the moment you introduce
those numbers on the screen people begin having a hard time noticing the atmosphere, or most usually the complete and utter lqck of
one). Consider, for example, to examine the process also from the
reverse sidg what would have happened to the Metroid games if,
instead of hunting for mechanics-altering and progress-enabling
items, you were hunting for boxes with random numbers on them
- boxes whose only function would be to increase your score, so
that by finding more of them than other players WHO ARE NOT
EVEN PRESENT IN THE GAMEWORLD you'd manage to beat
be utterly meaningless). But
their high scores. The entire series' atmosphere would have been
instantly wrecked this way - which is the exact opposite to what
would happen if pure scoring mechanics in scoring games were
replaced with mechanics-altering and progress-enabling mechanics, i.e. with natural mechanics.
And even stuff like extra lives, to finally touch on a subiect I
had earlier promised that I would, are quite unnatural, if you sit
and think about it for a moment, and should ideally be eliminated
(never mind that we are going the exact opposite way, wlth stuff like
Goku Maknimura and Hard Corps: Uprising handing out extra lives
like candy in an orphanage). For what is the justificatiory after all,
in terms of their respective gameworlds, of Joe Musashi and Sir
Arthur miraculously resurrecting in The Super Shinobi and Dqi'
makaimura after every death? You are supposed to be one-lifing
these games anyway, and the only reason you don't is because
they've not been designed with that idea in mind. "They'd be too
hard that way') you say; but if you removed the extra lives, and
LOWERED the level of difficulty accordingly to account for this
change, so that pre- and post-change the difficulty would be the
srme, you'd have increased the naturalness and immersiveness of
these worlds without affecting at all their challenge. "But I enioy
the additional challenge of searching the environment for stuff like
extra lives." Very welMn which case integrate them into the game in
other, more aesthetically appropriate forms. Turn those "lives" into
a useful item, for instance, which, by employing if you would get
benefits comparable to those of an extra life, like a suit of armor for
example (which the Makaimura series actually implemented, but
WITHOUT getting rid of the unnatural "lives" convention - for
reasons of traditio,n of course). And the same can, at least in theory,
be done with every unnatural mechanig and above all the purely.
scoring ones, which aS we've Seen are by far the most unnatural of
the lot.
But of course doing all this is not easy and demands not only
deep insight into these games and how they work, as well as talent and cipacity for much experimentation, but also a considerable appetite for going against the grain, tradition-smashing and
risk-tak{ne, given the fict-that you would, after all, be pissing off
all the aJpie gamers in the world, for whom extra lives and scoring systems are by now Holy Conventions that may as well have
370
been passed down by Moses himself when he came back from the
mountain. Moreover, all of this is especially difficult to accomplish
- and to CONTINUE accomplishing, as the complexity increases
- with primitive, inherently low-complexity genres (such all the
ones we've been discussing so far), since there's only so much natu-
ralness you can inject into a two-dimensional, cardboard-cutout

world before THE UNNATURALNESS OF THE WORLD ITSELF
begins showing; before you start coming up against the boundaries
of your chosen genre's very limits
- which is of course the "uncanny
valley" of videogames, and whichu as one would expecf is far more
dependent on mechanics than aesthetics (since a cartoony world
that functions in a realistic manner is far more immersive than a
realistic-looking world which works like a cartoon). But move away
from the 2D genres and all of the above becomes immediately obvious, even to bona fide retards, as you realize how absurd the idea of
a scoring system would seem in something like a Deus Ex or Grand
Theft Auto, or being miraculously resurrected in something like a
Far Cry or Shenmue without explanation. I've even seen developers of modern 3D games being interviewed on the subject of scoring systems, and flat out rejecting the idea as "inimical to immersion" (or something along these lines). Can t remember now where I
heard it and who said it, but someone said it plain as day - though
without, of course, being able to explain why. Designers of modern
3D games, in other words, mostly unconsciously realize that scoring is an archaism that won't work in modern stuff (quite simply
because LIFE HAS NO SCORE EITHER
- at least not a oisible one,
stuck on the top-right corner of everyone's field of vision), and it
has been precisely my goal with this essay to make this realization
conscious, by unraveling the genealogy of the scoring concept and
explaining, for every step of the process, exactly why it won't work.
Getting back to 2D games for a moment (and with good reason,
since it's only by fully grasping the implications of the theory on
these relatively simple examples that we can begin to get a grip ory
and extrapolate our conclusions to, the more advanced and complicated three-dimensional ones), does all this mean that Cave's
shooters are bad games? -No, as evidenced by the fact that all of
them reviewed onlnsomnia so far got five-star ratings. -That Prince
of Persia and Another World are better games than Goku Makaimura
and Hard Corps: Uprishrg? -No, as evidenced by the fact that I've
377
played, and I am still playing, the latter ones far more than the
former. There are way too many variables that go into determining the quality of a videogame to reduce the whole enterprise to
a couple of simplistic factors such as "naturalness of mechanics"
or "absence of scoring system". For the majority of Cave's shooters
are so awesome, that even if you ignore all the extra purely scoring
mechanics (which is in fact precisely what I do most of the time)
you still have better games than what everyone else has achieved
with simpler, more natural designs. Not to mention stuff like Goku
Mskaimura andHqrd Corps: Uprising, which, since they are not STGs,
feature far simpler, and thus more natural scoring mechanics than
Cave's shooters, while at the same time being far more fast-paced,
action-packed, intricate and demanding than the admittedly even
more natural Prince of Persia and Attother World templates, which
no one however has yet tried to bring up to date and modernizeby
investing them with Goku- and Uprising-levels of mechanical and
aesthetic mayhem.
Nevertheless, and that is the main point of this essay (in regards
to scoring in videogames, at least), the way forward for even the developers of Goku- andUprising-level stuff is the one I am indicating.
The way forward is for Tsuneki Ikeda to release a shooter in the arcades THAT DOES NOT FEATURE A SCORING SYSTEM. A shooter which, however, does not thereby sacrifice any of the mechanical
intricacy of its unfortunate predecessors but integrafes it in the form
of natural mechanics, the complete and total mastery of which is
REQUIRED to progress; with unbelievable aesthetics, so that the
player will WANT to struggle against its mechanics, and with a

difficulty level that DEMANDS world-class skills to reach the end.
This is the next stage as far as the 2D action genres are concerned,
otherwise we are back to games that can be cleared in a few days
or weeks, and then spending entire months messing with their utterly asinine scoring systems, without the slightest hope of seeing
anything new for all our trouble. And this, by the way, is precisely
what Ikeda and co. have unconsciously tried to compensate for,
by increasingly exaggerating their games' oisual (and sometimes
even aural) reaction to high scoring play,filling the screen with
some kind of stuff or other: points and score multipliers in various
guises, whose purpose is precisely to give the competent player
some kind of stronger aesthetic stimulation beyond that of a mere
372
number changing on the top-right corner of the screen. But though

this solution certainly helps mitigate the problem to an extenf it
is in the long run a RETARDED one, since these are supposed to
be shootinq games, not fuckingLumines or Tetris. Put simply, if shit
don't make sense it's not an STG, and an STG is a far higher genre
than some abstract fucking puzzle Bame, since it's something that
we, as humans beings, CAN MORE READILY RELATE TO: a battle
to save the uniaerse, not some random boxes falling out of fucking
nowhere for no apparent reason (as seen, for example, in Ketsui's
scoring system, which is even regarded as an extremely natural
one by contemporary standards!) The point then is to give you the
maximum of aesthetic stimulation (i.e. the next stage) at the exact
point of maximum mechanical challenge. Not BEFORE, as with the
scoring games, which have already shot their (aesthetic) loads before the player has even begun sweating; and certainly not AFTER,
as a reward in the form of a cool ending cinematic; but DURING
the actual playing experience, to heighten the dramatic impact of
each moment. The ending can even be sort of toned down, in comparison; in the best of games a brief period of relaxation (similar
to the cool-down period in sports training) in which all the accumulated tension of the climax can be dissipated, as for example in
The Super Shinobi. You are supposed to be utterly beat by that point,
and trying to overload your senses at the end is a sign of bad taste
in the designers, or an attempt to compensate for failing to achieve
an appropriate climax in the last stage. The last stage, which must
not only be the most challenging but also by far the prettiest one
(something which hardly ever happens, because developers would
rather use their best stuff to draw the player into their game, while
knowing very well that most people hardly ever persevere until
the end, even in stupid grinding games that everyone is meant to
finish). And of course/ once the game is over IT MUST REALLY BE
OVER, and any attempt to induce the player to go over THE EXACT SAME AESTHETICS by throwing in some cheap mechanical
gimmick (see second loops, alternate modes, "ne\^/ game{'fagotries
and the like) is nothing other than a flagrant example of RUBBISH
CAME DESIGN and probably even a sign that something serious
was lacking even from the standard game.
Does all this sound too hard to you, dear current and prospective
game designers? That's good, because it's meant to - we're talking
about an artform, and about particular genres, that have been evolving for close to fioe decades now OF COURSE it's going to be hard
topping their greatest achievements; but if you want a masterpiece,
that's what you have to do. And of course with every success the task
simply gets harder and harder - but that's what progress/ REAL
progress, is all about. Otherwise if it were easy, everyone would be
i! Ikeda wouldn't be calling Iuchi a genius, and the "indie"

would
be churning out masterpieces every other week, instead
bums
of trash that no one remembers a few months or years after release
(with most of them not even lasting beyond a few days, since they
don't have the entire journlolistic and pseudo-academic machinery
pulling them up and keeping them afloat for a little while longer).
doing
Conclusions
finally realize that the scoring debacle came about due to

natural, historical reasons, and is being maintained, perpetuated
and even exacerbated and apotheosized, despite its obvious obsoSo we
lescence, by:
1. The stupidity, incompetence and commercial considerations of
designers (who lack the intelligence necessary to understand why
scoring mechanics are inimical to progress, the talent necessary to
keep complexifying their games with properly integrated mechanics, and who moreover need the dual-mechanics model so as not to
scare away new players),
2. The stupidity, exhibitionism and lack of proper
life experiences
of the aspies (who are too stupid to realize that scoring mechanics
are bad mechanics, too exhibitionist to stop caring whether anyone
knows how they did in this or that game, and too lacking in proper
life experiences to realize how much stronger, healthier and more
fulfilling their lives would be if they poured their competitive urges into real sports and achievements, instead of in illusory ones),
and finally
3. The weakness and stupidity of new players and casual players (who are too weak to properly tackle complex, modern gaming, and too stupid too realize that if they find modern games too
374
complex and/or difficult they should be playing older, less complex

and/or difficult games until they work up the skills and above all
the burning desire to tackle the modern stuff).
I.e. by weakness, weakness, weakness, and again weakness

in the end).
But the future is created neither by weaklings nor for weaklings, and every step forward, every REAL step forward (as opposed to the kind manufactured by journlolistic and pseudo-academic hyp") in any existing genre whatsoever (barring retro revivals of the most primitive genres), and even, and above all, in
the creation of NEW GENRES, must take into account every last
detail of the analysis I have provided here; at any rate it will take
it into accounf if not consciously then certainly znconsciously.
And don't think (to finally properly touch on the subject of the advanced, three-dimensional genres) that just because most modern
3D games lack obvious scoring systems, that they are completely
free of autistic scoring tendencies, for where do you think the "100
hidden packages" ln GTAIII came from? (packages distributed utterly arbitrarily throughout the world, and whose collection has
absolutely no bearing on the game at all beyond a number chanp;ing in some options menu), or the "Kill 40 Chinese dudes" missions that are utterly disconnected from the plotline, or indeed
even the setting, and above all the ubiquitous completion percentages, which are even WORSE than traditional scoring systems,
for christsake, since those systems are at least meant to EXPAND
the length of the player's stay inside the gameworld, whereas the
goddamn percentages are like a timer on the top-right corner of a
movie going THE MOVIE IS ABOUT TO END IN 20 MINUTES...
IN 19 MINUTES... IN 18 MINUTES... and so on and so forth - I
mean FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, HOW HARD CAN IT BE TO
UNDERSTAND WHAT A TERRIBLE EFFECT THIS TEXTBOOKAUTISTIC SHIT HAS ON THE EXPERIENCE OF PLAYING A
GODDAMN VIDEOGAME?
Extremely hard, apparently, which is why we need to fight
against it every step of the way, review by review by every single
goddamn review; and of course chiefly through this essali just as
we have to fight the enjoyment-demolishing habit of credit-feeding in arcade games, and the raising of crap videogames to mas(since that is all these reasons boil down to
375
ilt
terpiece status via the "parody" excuse, and the "value for money"
beggars inducing designers to bloat our games with shit, and RPGs
being debased to tactics games, and the simplification, casualization, challenge elimination and above all artfagotization that have
become endemic in most of modern gaming, and the "indie" label
being used to forestall, confuse and ultimately stifle the critical enterprise, and and and and...
This, then, is the task at hand, and it's by no means an easy

one; but let's bring this essay to a close with a subtle observatiory
which I am sure no one will have made so far due to the barrage
of arguments I've been throwing everyone's way, and the lack of
time in which to think properly about everything I've been saying.
Let's just briefly clarify this one sticky issue here, then, to make
sure we've dealt with the subject of scoring, and especially that of
cyber"athletics') from all angles. It's not quite true that pouring a
lot of competitive energy into videogames (as opposed to in real
sports) is unhealthy. It certainly is unhealthy in the case of nction
games, since the actual exercise one gets from wiggling a stick or
whatever is negligible, but the mental exercise that can be gained
from the more cerebral genres, such as all kinds of tactics lstrategyl
management games and the like, is by no means negligible - on
the contrary, lt far outstrips what real-life games have to offer in
this regardprecisely because videogames are inherently cerebral. The
mental stimulation to be found in the celebrated chess, for example
(or indee d in any board game), is NOTHING compared to that of
something like Ciailization, just like the tactical thinking involved
in football or basketball or soccer strategies or whatever is negligible
compared to what's required to get anywhere in a decent RTS (with
the turn-based end of the spectrum testing and developing primarily long-term decision making, while the real-time end developing
fast thinking under pressure. This is also what'America's Army"
gets out of even FPSes: not actual physical skill in running fast and
shooting guns, which can of course only be developed by having
people actually running fast and shooting guns, but giving people
some basic idea of how a real combat squad is supposed to operate
and coordinate, which is a mostly mental affair - as opposed, for
example, to flight or tank or submarine simulators, when there are
sticks/pedals, etc. involved, which even in reality are not very physically demanding activities, and hence can be fairly easily and ac376
curately simulated). So bragging rights in the more cerebral games

have actual real-world releaance, whereas in action games are pitiable
and indicative of some kind of physical and/or mental handicap so
if you absolutely MUST
obsess over your performance in a virtual

(i.e. a tiny) environmenf at least obsess about its cerebral part. Even
that, however, if pursued unheedingly (by, for example, replaying
the same old shitty game a billion times over in order to become the
best player in the world in if instead of moving on to newer, better,

Iarger, more immersive games), is deeply anti-artistic (because repetition is inherently anti-imrnersioe), and when the "human improvement" prerogative is finally brought in ultimately leads to so-called
"serious games", whose top priority is not to entertain but to train,
and which are therefore, precisely due to this fact (and as we'll also
be seeing at length
in an upcoming
essay), once more inherently
anti-artistic.
ii

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ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

prehensive one (which I am anyway temperamentally unsuited

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

time, they feature extremely varied, lush, and colorful stages,

VIDEOGAME CUTTURE: VOLUME I

Strictly-speaking, and in theory, yes, but in practice not quite so.

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

possibility spaces, which is why they lend themselves much more

VTDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

And next thing I remember there I was, having almost beaten it

if I was still inside the gameworld, still accomplishing something

that mattered. And the goddamn game, being essentially

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

extremely wide range of tastes so that I can appreciate and enjoy

doomed to interminably obsess over the small number, really a

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

tire generation of players who do not seem at all concerned with

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

with it, but to also HOLD ON TO THAT SLOT

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

thing they tell you in aspie school to do on getting your hands on

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

environments and gunning people down with M16s and AK-47s,

ed little stick-wiggling and mouse-clicking top-scoring brethren,

QUADRIPLEGIC (see, for example, Stephen Hawking), whereas the

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

high score stands currently at 1:07, compared to Phelps's 47.57, so I

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

in the world at, for example, guiding a tiny little

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

as I have been explaining here also healthier) than Counter-Strike (as

but which any half-way intelligent gamer should have already at

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

And it is precisely at this point, having concluded our analysis

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

constantly being consumed and reversed, it being an unspoken rule

These so-called "scoring mechanics", therefore, these "traces" of

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

straightaway come, "but in the interests of competition which

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

convoluted scoring systems, exemplified by Cave's shooters, and

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

to right (or bottom to top or diagonally as in Zaxxon or Viewpoint

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

less of reward, so the reward becomes superfluous; and since all

aspie playing the game is determined to search every goddamn

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

random action-puzzle gar:re with awesome aesthetics (a heirloom

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPTES

Which is why superplays of older games are far more watchablg

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

ple, and an empty scoreboard sitting in a vacuum by itself would

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I

ON WHY SCORING SUCKS AND THOSE WHO DEFEND IT ARE ASPIES

ralness you can inject into a two-dimensional, cardboard-cutout

VIDEOGAME CULTURE: VOLUME I