Topic: High Scores

After watching the documentary "The King of Kong: A FistFul of Quarters" (a film I will be referencing throughout the semester) I came across an interesting difference between the "original" gamers from the late 1970's and 1980's and the modern gamers. This difference is in the reasons and goals that the players have in playing video games, especially for hours after hours.

The obvious fact that the original video games were not nearly as sophisticated as the ones today, so the main aspect of a game was to see how high of a points total you could achieve. The film was based on a man trying to get the world record in Donkey Kong points, but whether it be that game or PacMan, Frogger, Centipede, etc, game players would spend hours and hours in trying to acheive the highest score possible.

This has changed in recent years. Most games that are made now are played with the objective of completing the game. The idea of a high score is not as important as it used to be. While the object of scoring points in some games still remains, the goal of getting a high score does not matter. No longer do you type your intials into a roster where they will stay until someone beats it. In the popular games such as Call of Duty, Fallout, Halo, etc the objective of the game is to complete it and much of the time once this is done the player moves onto a different game.

Of course, there are some games that still use a points system but they are not as prominent as they once were. Players do not spend hours playing a game to get a high score, they play to beat the game. I think this is something interesting that I had not thought of until after I watched this film.

The film gave me a lot of of ideas to think about which have not occured to me before. Even though I have been playing video games ever since the original Atari and when they still had Arcades, it is not as easy to see the evolution of video games and the type of gaming culture that changes with it.