Let's look at those Geometry Wars 2 leaderboards

Above: Not a picture of a high score list, but what can you do?

A few people have rightly noted that not all of the Guitar Hero III scores I posted about on Tuesday can be easily and independently verified, so I thought it might be helpful to look at some Geometry Wars 2 scores and see if the pattern holds. Online leaderboards don't seem to be activated on the official website yet, so I'll just use the Xbox Live scoreboards as they appear as of this writing (that's Thursday night around 8:00 PM, Eastern time).*

We'll look at Pacifism mode, because that seems to be the one with the chance for the most ridiculously inflated scores. And indeed, the numbers bear that out.

First, on a personal note: right now, I'm the 15,236th ranked Pacifism player. Not so great, but it's good for 4th on my friends list! (Out of, uh, 7 people on my friends list who own this game.)

But the score list goes much further down than that. Exactly how much further, I'm not sure, but the lowest ranking person on my friends list is in the 55,000s, and the scroll bar icon next to my score is about one-fifth of the way from the top. This tells me I'm probably an above-average player, 80th percentile or so. My score of 18,690,325 is a good baseline to set as we look at the top of the list.

The top ranked player, Windforce Azumo, checks in with 1,432,247,950! He's 76 times better than I am at Pacifism.

Then comes the drop-off. The number 2 player, Leaping, has 1,275,127,850. That's a difference of 157,120,100 points -- or more than 8 times more than my total score. It's a decline of over 10%. And these, remember, are the two best Pacifism players in the world as of this moment.

The 5th best player, Evil Mask, has 1,010,568,025. Over 400,000,000 lower than the leader.

The 10th best, Tyrak Stinger, has 807,120,000. The decline over the first 10 spots is more than 600,000,000 points.

Compare this to what happens when you're further toward the middle of the bell curve. The player ten spots above me has 18,707,625 -- only 17,300 points more.

The player who is ten rungs lower on the ladder than I am has 18,659,725 points. That's only 30,600 points less. It's a .1% drop from my score -- practically none at all.

By contrast, the drop from the 1st ranked player to the 10th is more than 43%!

What does this all mean? For one thing, it means that even if those Guitar Hero scores weren't fully on the level, the patterns we detected in them were still legit. The best of the best haven't just pushed the outside of the envelope, they've blown right past it and lived to tell the tale.

The scary thing is that someone is going to top Windforce Azumo's ludicrous score. You can bet on it. After all, you don't have to score that highly consistently to set a record -- you just have to do it once. You just have to play the game of your life. Each person's personal ceiling is different, but I'm sure someone out there has the right stuff to blow past 1.5 billion, and probably even 2. I can't wait to see it happen.

*Hilariously, over the course of writing this post I signed out and back into Xbox Live. In that time, I dropped from 15,236 to 15,304. So the numbers aren't exact. But they're close. Anyway, this is supposed to be fun.

The best of the best

Above: You're the best around/Nothing's gonna ever keep you down

Got some good comments on yesterday's post about Geometry Wars 2 high scores, which led to some further thoughts on the subject.

One thing that amazes me about almost every high score list is the distribution of scores. I don't know if they tend to fall exactly along a bell curve, but it seems like it. The bulk of the point totals always seem to be within shouting distance of one another. The very best players, though, are operating on another level entirely.

Look at the leaderboards for Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock on the Xbox 360.* Your top 5 scores on campaign mode, expert difficulty:

1. vipen -- 706,651,708
2. ecartman33 -- 637,281,856
3. Shattered121 -- 612,228,928
4. Lexomatico -- 595,959,234
5. Eldar5150 -- 557,842,830

The difference between the best Guitar Hero III player and the fifth-best Guitar Hero III player is nearly 150 million points! Another way to put it: the top player, vipen, is more than 20% better than the fifth, Eldar5150.

The scores keep dropping from there, but they flatten out quickly. Look at how much further down the list you have to go to mark each subsequent 150 million-point increment.

1. vipen -- 706,651,708
5. Eldar5150 -- 557,842,830
23. XISXISXIS -- 407,726,029
204. uberpwnzn00bs -- 257,721,386
3,314. Just Lucky -- 107,720,493

Now here's the really crazy thing. Judging by that short list above, you'd think that Just Lucky was no great shakes as a Guitar Hero player. He's barely 1/7 as good as the best player. If this were a head-to-head competition, it'd be a bigger blowout than Super Bowl XXIV.

This is a game that has sold millions of copies. The high score list for campaign mode, expert difficulty, on the Xbox 360 version of Guitar Hero III likely contains hundreds of thousands of names. Just Lucky is most likely in the top 1 or 2% of all players, without even factoring in the people who only play on lower difficulty settings, and don't qualify for the expert list. In all probability, Just Lucky rates even more highly than that. He's one of the best in the world. But he's not within striking distance of the number-one guy.

I bring this up because it's inspiring and discouraging at the same time. Let's be honest: Your odds of being the best at a videogame are about equal to your chances of winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Sure, someone has to do it, but six billion others won't. Only a handful can compete. Why should you even try?

Because it's astonishing, the heights to which we can aspire. People have been motivated throughout our history by the notion that certain feats, however unlikely, were still somehow possible. I see someone scoring over 700 million points in Guitar Hero and I think to myself -- wow, I didn't even know the mountain went up that high.

*Caveat lector: Those scores were all accurate via the Guitar Hero website at the time of this posting, but when I went into the game itself to see if I could get a sense of how long the score lists are, they seemed completely different. Some of the same names were on there, but it was difficult to corroborate the lists. But since I'd already written 99% of the post, well, here you go.

I couldn't score in high school, either

Above: Paging Matthew Gallant.

After my first session with Geometry Wars 2*, I was astonished to find that I'd taken over the top spots on all six leaderboards. Maybe, I thought, I had some preternatural ability at this game. At long last, I'd found the one thing I was put on this earth to do -- the one thing I could do so well, I could rightly call myself the baddest man alive.

I probably don't need to mention that, at the time, only two people on my friends list were actually playing GW2. And, no, I didn't really think I was some sort of top-down shooting savant. The lack of competition suited me just fine. When I mentioned, both on Twitter and on a message board, that I was perched comfortably atop my leaderboards, naturally I ignited some competitive fires and received several friend requests. In short order, I'd been put in my rightful place.

Now, one of the fun things about Geometry Wars 2 is that your score seems to increase exponentially as you pick up multipliers. Destroying any given enemy is worth more points the deeper you progress into a game. As more and more foes show up, the faster your score ratchets up. It takes about as long to go from 0 to 100,000 points as it does to get from there to 1,000,000.

Even so -- I cannot freaking believe these scores. People are insane.

My top score in Evolved mode, which is the classic style, is a shade over 9,000,000. As of my last session, the number-one player on my leaderboards had clocked a cool 33,000,000. That was on Friday. I expect to see 9 digits when I log on later tonight, now that people have had a whole weekend to grind me into pulp beneath their shoes.

I had still been pretty competitive in Pacifism mode, with over 14,000,000 points. According to commenters on a related MTV Multiplayer post, at least one videogame Chuck Yeager has already broken 1,000,000,000 points. If your eyes glaze over at the sight of so many zeroes, as mine do, that's a billion.

Here's the surprising thing: this is killing me. I really enjoyed occupying the top spot of a randomly selected subset of geometric warriors. It was easy enough to ignore the little numbers indicating my place in the entire Geometry Wars hierarchy, as long as the large-print friends list looked so tasty. Now? My fallibility has been confirmed.

I have long insisted that high scores and head-to-head gameplay don't interest me. I'm a tourist. I play games to participate in a narrative, to travel through new worlds and partake in innovative interactive experiences. High scores are a relic of a bygone era.

I'll just admit it now: I say those things because I'm not very good at video games. Or, at least, the gulf in ability between me and the best players is so vast as to be untraversable. Usually, I like to think I'm at peace with this. It shouldn't affect my enjoyment of a game. The strange thing is that in this case, it's making it more fun. Geometry Wars 2 would probably be a blast on its own, to some degree, but the emphasis on competing high scores is what makes it impossible to put down, even for a hopeless case like me. I don't expect I'll get the top spots back any time soon -- okay, or ever -- but I'll be damned if I don't claw my way up at least a little bit.

Or I could delete everyone off my friends list, buy a big foam finger, and parade around shouting "I'm number 1!" But what use is it if no one can see?

*Can we clear this up? Is it Geometry Wars 2 Retro Evolved, or is it Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2? Or can we just call it Geometry Wars 2 and leave it at that?

A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Skill Players: Drilling Down

This is the fifth in an 11-part series. To start from the beginning, read part one: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Games." Or read the previous post, "Case Study: Guitar Hero."

We've established that Skill Players are concerned primarily with mastery of the game rather than enjoying the stops along the way. Their idea of "beating" a game is to pound it into submission. But this can mean different things depending on the game and on one's inclinations. It may be that Skill Players themselves, while broadly similar, have different motivations for playing games, and can be further classified into two more similar but distinct groups: Completists and Perfectionists.

A Completist may be less interested in maximizing his ability to play a game, and more interested in making sure he doesn't miss anything. Certainly you wouldn't say it takes skill per se to locate all the packages in Grand Theft Auto III, or all the agility orbs in Crackdown. It takes patience and determination. And while the game does offer incentives to do these things, in both cases they're non-essential to the task of beating the game in the traditional sense. The reward is having no mountains left to climb.

Compare this to the Tourist, who may find packages along the way and appreciate the financial reward, or who grabs agility orbs as a necessary part of gameplay, but won't take the time to find that 500th one. In the case of Crackdown, there is no quantifiable difference in your character's jumping ability between the 499th and 500th agility orb. It does not help you complete the missions to acquire every single one, but it does net you achievement points. The reason a Completist falls under the Skill Player heading is because his concern is not with surrending to the rules of the game world, but instead with asserting his dominance over them.

A typical Perfectionist is the classic high-score freak. Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe come to mind. They don't care about rescuing the princess; they care about proving who's the best Donkey Kong player. Donkey Kong himself is not the antagonist to these players. The scoreboard is. Other players are. There's a reason the only people still playing Donkey Kong are Perfectionists. A Completist would just need to make it to the kill screen once. A Tourist would probably do a cost-benefit analysis of rescuing the princess and move on to a different game.

Bottom line: the Perfectionist sees success as relative to the performance of others. In a sense, the last-place player in a Halo match could be said to have finished the game. But for the Perfectionist in him, it sure doesn't feel that way. Other examples of the Perfectionist style might be trying to get all "S" rankings in Devil May Cry, or playing through Ninja Gaiden Black on the hardest difficulty. In both cases, the appeal is in accomplishing something that only a select few ever will.

As with the earlier Guitar Hero example, which described how Skill Players and Tourists may differ in their approach to performing the same task, we may see situations where the Completist and the Perfectionist seem to be doing the same thing. Consider somebody who earns all 1,000 achievement points in an Xbox 360 game. For the Completist, there's no surer sign that he's completed everything there is to complete. There are no more worlds to conquer. For the Perfectionist, it means he has earned the highest possible score -- a perfect score. The biggest difference is that this likely means the Completist has, for all intents and purposes, finished his experience with the game. We can't infer the same thing about the Perfectionist unless we have more information.

Earlier we looked at how Guitar Hero was able to appeal to Skill Players and Tourists equally. Now that we've split Skill Players into two sub-groups, while leaving the Tourist group as it is, it's time to consider a different scenario. What happens when a game contains discrete elements that appeal to all three types of gamers, but those elements work in discordance with each other? Can we use these terms as a window into why a well-made, premium console game might still seem off -- why it might not work on a gut level? And can we isolate those traits in a single game that appeal separately to Completists, Perfectionists, and Tourists?

We sure can.

Next: Case Study: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

A New Taxonomy of Gamers: Skill Players vs. Tourists

This is the third in an 11-part series. To start from the beginning, read part one: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Games." Or read the previous post, "Hardcore? Casual? Hardcasual?"

The problems with the hardcore/casual distinction are evident. The terms may still be useful to us, but for now let's leave them there and explore some other top-level possibilities. In a recent news post, Penny Arcade's Tycho mused on a different dichotomy: "people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy." I'd been thinking of something similar for awhile, but had never written about it because I couldn't think of what to call those groups of people.

The solution hit me while reading Slate's Gaming Club. Seth Schiesel writes:

Thinking about the twist in BioShock—and the huff that some folks have gotten into over it—brought to mind something Hilmar Petursson, chief executive of the Icelandic game company CCP, told me recently. He was referring specifically to online games, but it illuminates an important component of single-player games as well.

"There are basically two schools of thought for operating an online community," he said. "There is the theme-park approach and the sandbox approach. ... Most games are like Disneyland, for instance, which is a carefully constructed experience where you stand in line to be entertained. [My company focuses] on the sandbox approach where people can decide what they want to do in that particular sandbox, and we very much emphasize and support that kind of emergent behavior."

Couple that with the words of Gabe from Penny Arcade, who said:

Tycho talked about the different reasons people play games in his post and I thought it was pretty interesting. It's a conversation we've had before and I think it's something a lot of gamers probably don't think about. I remember it came up while we were both playing Metroid Prime: Corruption. I was talking to him about how I was getting frustrated because some of the boss battles were really giving me a hard time. I realised I don't play games for the challenge. I don't need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls "new art". I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don't play games to beat them I play games to see them. Coming to that realisation was actually sort of important for me.

There are two fundamental reasons people play games. They're not mutually exclusive, but they are separate. Some people play to master a game -- to perfect its mechanics, to explore every inch of the game world. Some play to "see the sights" -- to hit the high points and not get too caught up in the minutiae. Let's call these groups "Skill Players" and "Tourists."

"Skill Players" is a nice, literal designation that I think will make sense immediately. We're talking about people for whom the appeal of a video game is becoming an expert at it. People who hanker for high scores and unlockables. These are the guys who pursue achievement points long after beating the main campaign of a game, because, to them, completing the story isn't the real purpose of the game. Genre may be less important to these gamers than simply having a challenge to overcome.

"Tourists" is more euphemistic, but I think it carries the right connotations. Imagine somebody visiting France for the first time. They want to see the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Coeur, and the Louvre. They don't speak the language or know the streets, and they don't much care. As long as they can get where they're going, they're not interested in experiencing what a native might call the "real" Paris. And when the trip is done, they probably won't be heading back to France any time soon to find some hidden gem of a crêperie. Instead, the tourist wants to go to China to see the Great Wall. The Tourist gamer is the same way: "beating" a game is more about checking off the big moments than earning a 100% completion rate.

I like the sound of this. We've got a way to classify gamers not by the games they like, but why they like those games. But remember, the reason we're talking about this in the first place is to try to solve the problem of how to talk about games on common ground. We're still not there, not least because many successful games find a way to appeal to Skill Players and to Tourists. It may be useful to look more closely at a single game through this prism.

Next: Case Study: Guitar Hero