So, there’s a casual computer game Your Humble Blogger likes to play as a brief break between various things. It doesn’t really matter which one, but it’s the kind of game that is more-or-less timed with the goal of making the most points within sixty seconds. I play three games in five minutes or so, and it’s a break from thinking as well as from working or chores.
Anyway, I’ve been playing this game for months and months, several times a day, usually, and over that time I reached an achievement plateau, not getting particularly better or worse. Like a lot of such games, there are two ways to play: with boosts or without. I mostly play without; it’s fun to play with boosts now and then, but as my general self-amusement, it’s the basic game, quick and done. The range of scores was still very wide, but it was the same range. Over time, I wound up (as y’all know I do) making a list of ranges and correspondences. As such:
- Under 25,000: Pathetic. Just an embarrassing score. Needs an excuse of some kind, preferable that someone else was distracting me or preventing me from seeing and/or touching the screen.
- 25,000-49,999: Crappy. Let’s face it, this is a crappy score. Not a reflection on my character or anything, but a crappy score.
- 50,000-99,999: Not Bad. Or, perhaps, Meh. Not a bad game, but not a terribly good one, either. Unremarkable. If things had gone better, it would have been a good game—perhaps there was a stretch when I couldn’t see any matches, or I never got a big combo, but other than that, it went fine.
- 100,000-199,999: Good. A satisfactory game. Things went well, and didn’t go badly. Success.
- 200,000 and up: Excellent. I feel it reflects well on my character, really.
And the thing about these ranges is that they pretty much corresponded to my feeling about how the game had just gone. I experienced as a meh game would almost always have a score between 50,000 and 100,000. If I finished a game thinking that was a good game, it was generally over 100,000. A game that I experienced as an excellent game would almost always have a score over 200,000. Not always, of course, but mostly the scores lined up with how I experienced the game, and how I experienced the game lined up with the scores at the end.
Digression: I did amuse myself greatly, as I am wont to do, by identifying a further special category of games: those games in which the time ended with a score under 50,000 but for which the final bonus boosted the score past the 50,000 mark. Those games I call technically non-crappy. As the final score is outside the crappy category, they are technically non-crappy, but they hardly rise to the level of meh. This is a unique category—those games that are boosted over the 100,000 mark at the final stage are in fact good games, legitimately breaking through that hundred-thousand barrier, and those that are boosted over the 50,000 are in fact crappy ones, legitimately saved from pathos. I think the phrase technically non-crappy is particularly evocative of the experience of playing one of these, and furthermore, I believe that the baseball statistic now known as quality starts should be referred to from now on as technically non-crappy starts. End Digression.
Anyway, the point is that I have been playing this game, on and off, for years now, and I had settled in to a level of play that I was comfortable with enough to have my own in-jokes with myself about how I was doing. And then… a few weeks ago that all changed. My scores went up enormously. Games that felt crappy were scoring 75,000; games that I would have called meh ended with 150,000 points. Games with scores between 200,000 and 300,000 became more frequent. I stopped seeing scores under 50,000 much at all, and not ever below 25,000. It felt as if scores essentially doubled.
Now, this did happen after I changed my tactics a trifle, essentially downgrading one of the several priorities. There are (let’s call them) speed bonuses, combo bonuses and multipliers; while I always considered multipliers the most valuable, I recently decided to concentrate on them even more narrowly, and take the other bonuses only when they happened to come. So perhaps the change in my scores is because I have changed from suboptimal gameplay to optimal (or perhaps just better) play: I improved. If that’s what it is, then I’m sad about that, as for crying out loud I have been playing this game for years. Also, if the game is designed to reward that narrow focus rather than rewarding the player who juggles three priorities, then the game is designed more poorly than I thought.
Of course, it’s also possible that the timing is a coincidence, and that I have been scoring more because my pocket computer (what we laughingly call a telephone) is working slower, having turned old enough now to be kludged up with crap. I have had the experience of getting better scores on various games on older computers that give me an extra quarter-second here or there to see things that I would not have seen otherwise. So maybe it’s the machine, not the person. If it’s the machine, though, it’s a bad sign for things more important, perhaps, than casual gaming.
Or, then, it’s perfectly plausible that the latest software update (more or less the same time) just made the game easier. It would be easy enough to do, either by making multipliers more frequently available (thus amplifying my change in practice) or simply by making easier screens. There are a few reasons why a game designer would make a game easier after leaving it alone for a few years—perhaps they think new higher scores will lead to more social-media sharing of those scores and so more visibility for the game. I don’t know.
All I know is, my scores have gone up, and I’m enjoying the game a lot less. Strange, but it’s so.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.