I am 7 years old, and it is Christmas time. My grandmother’s living room is abuzz with a cacophony of new jobs and honor rolls and swim team accomplishments – but I am not listening.

Instead, my attention is held by the game of Tetris I’m playing on my newly acquired Game Boy.  As a boy of 7 I am enamored and allured by so many facets of the game, from the quick thinking to the meticulous manipulation of blocks necessary for my success.  But mostly, I am entranced by the High Score.  I played for hours on end just to see that number in the corner rise a little higher, kept myself awake at nights to go just one more level.

***

As a gamer, the score is what it’s all about.  The elation of beating your previous best could only ever be matched by the agony of falling just short.  It was more than just a score, it was a measure of your very worth as a human being.  In the days of my youth, it was the very thing we strove for.  Plastering your 3 initials to the Top 10 list at an arcade was no mere idle schoolboy accomplishment – it was a declaration of your prowess, a statement of your immortality.  Those 3-letter monikers became the signatures of gaming legends, the pantheon of the arcade gods.

Even if you were playing at home, and the leaderboard programmed into your cartridge would only ever be seen by you, the fervor and dedication was the same.  We as gamers were beholden to the phenomenon of scrolling numbers; once added to the top of our screens, they became our raison d’etre, and we happily performed whatever tasks those numbers demanded of us.

In a way, it’s why we play games in the first place.  As gamers, we forge meaningful and often personal relationships with these bundles of pixels and sprites.  After all, we spend countless hours with them, often as much time as we spend with our coworkers or even loved ones.  We pour so much of ourselves into our games, this is one little thing they can give back to us.  We crave some sort of validation or proof of our efforts.  We need to know that our hours of time, effort, and emotional investment have amounted tosomething – our games reward us this with the high score.  More than simply an arbitrary number, the score is our stamp we leave on the games we play.  They are tangible vestiges of our efforts and triumphs – they make our games truly ours.

***

I am 23 years old.  It is 2010, and I am in my living room playing Assassin’s Creed II.  There is no high score for me to beat – instead, I hunt achievements.  I am treated to a blip when I am successful, but in the grand scheme of the game I am playing this is largely irrelevant.  I receive no special accolades, no badass sword or special acknowledgement for having done so.  There is certainly no “score” that this impacts.  Ezio neither knows nor cares if I find all the hidden flags, and his world offers me nothing to mark the occasion.  The next time he and I meet, he will have already forgotten.  I will find no comfort or congratulations in the numbers of this game, for it has none to give me.  Instead I must leave the world of the game and seek solace in the achievement screen.

Many modern games, like Assassin’s Creed II, no longer have “high scores.”  Like a Pikachu holding a Thunderstone, our beloved scores have evolved into a new form.  Games are no longer the measure of your score, they are the currency.  Assassin’s Creed II is not a game in itself, it is merely a level in the larger “game” that the achievement screen has become.  Playing through Ezio’s story is akin to clearing “worlds 1-1 through 1-3″.  While as a 7 year old, I cleared levels of Tetris to raise my high score, now, I clear whole games to improve my “gamerscore”.  Xbox Live is a single massive leaderboard, with all my triumphs and failures on display.

And yet something seems off.   Pouring hours into Tetris or F-Zero to best your score breeds an intimate familiarity with the games – like a lover or an old friend, you come to know and understand them, and truly experience all they have to offer.  That feeling is now conspicuously absent.  Like before, I am relentlessly focused on the score, yet the individual games themselves are no longer relevant; they are now just series of these blips.  I race to fill my blip quota so I can move on to the next title on the assembly line, the next series of blips.

Now I just point to my gamerscore, sitting on its own screen, cold and detached from any of its constituent parts.  The games are simply a means to an end, large-scale levels in this new meta-game of posturing and chest-thumping and “look at me”-hardcore-gamer machismo we find ourselves playing   Part of me wonders if this is really better – if maybe we shouldn’t have pushed B to stop the evolution.  The other part of me, the weaker but ultimately much larger part, checks the achievement list, and finds out what I have to do next.

***

I am 24 years old.  It is 4 AM and I am playing Commander Keen, id Software’s intergalactic adventure platformer from 1990.  And I am in the zone.  I blast through each primitively rendered level, completing each one faster than before, collecting more pickups and scoring more points than before.   I am totally plugged in, in-tune with the game in a way I thought I had forgotten.   There are no achievements, no blips, no public displays of competence through the giant leaderboard orgy that is Xbox Live.  I glance at the numbers in the corner of the screen scrolling steadily higher with each blasted enemy, and smile contently.

Originally published by Patrick Lindsey on Pixels or Death