Note: The following article contains mild spoilers for Adios.

In the golden era of the arcade, there was no honour higher than having your name appear on a leaderboard. One of the magic qualities of video games is that they can take an attribute as ephemeral as skill and put a number to it. To have your initials posted on a leaderboard was to prove that you had the number supreme, and the idle cabinet would advertise that fact to anyone in its vicinity. It's a testament to how much video games have changed that this hall of fame, once emblematic of the medium, is absent from the majority of games that release today and has been relegated to a secondary feature in many others. Ya gotta ask, "Where did all the leaderboards go?". The answer uncovers how peoples' social proximities and the types of satisfaction we seek from the medium have transformed over time.

Leaderboards Over Time and Space

Designers strive to include only elements in their work which will be meaningful to audiences, so to deduce where in the world leaderboards went, we need to discuss why they were meaningful to players in the first place. We must also explore what developments in the medium made them less relevant. To start, rankings have more relevance to players when they know the people they're being ranked against. Besting a stranger carries some social cachet, but generally, the better you know someone, the closer it hits when you win or lose against them. Think about how it feels to play Helldivers or Fall Guys with random names plucked from the infinite internet versus what it's like to play with your friends. So, if a leaderboard can establish a rivalry with someone we know, it's literally personal. And even knowing the three letters we're trying to knock off the ladder represent someone who could walk past us in the same arcade, it makes them a little more real.

When desktops and consoles got connected to the internet and the whole world started posting to leaderboards, suddenly, the large majority of participants on them had no relation to us, geographically or otherwise. In this migration of games hardware from public places into the home and onto the internet, we see two defining features of how richer societies were reorganised through the back half of the 20th century and through the 21st so far. As people purchased more personal appliances, they didn't have as much of a reliance on shared commercial and community property, and so, could spend more time at home, physically removed from local spaces and their communities.

If you have a washing machine, you don't need to visit the laundromat. If you have a film streaming service, there's less reason to spend a Sunday evening at the cinema. And if you have a console at home, you don't need to go to the arcade. If you're not playing a game in an arcade, a ranking system based on competition at one particular machine doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This is not to say home conveniences don't have significant upsides or that we weren't connected to more people after the advent of the internet. Still, the overriding effect of these technologies was to diminish the role of the local in our lives and increase our investment in social and media links nationally and internationally. In games, that constituted a deemphasising of local competition and the rise of online gaming.

We'll talk about internet-connected console games in a moment, but for the minute, let's explore the holdover period between when games touched down in living rooms and when our homes went online. During this interval, if you wanted to rank against someone else on a ladder, you had to be playing the same cartridge as them. So, you might end up being able to trump a sibling's score on the leaderboards but no one else's, and even then, that's a "might" based on whether there was anyone else in your household who played the game.

Today, falling prices and rising adoption rates for tech have meant people share machines less often than they used to. Therefore, the local offline leaderboard is superfluous for most peoples' use. It can be fun to see if you can lap your own record, but that's already possible with a single high score; no leaderboard required. To get a kick out of a leaderboard of you, you have to be able to take pride in besting your third or fourth-best time at a particular course. I won't say it sounds unappealing, but it's not going to set the gaming world on fire. Therefore, leaderboards never became associated with disconnected consoles the way they did with public standup machines.

Player rankings eventually went online, but then they became notoriously susceptible to hacking. It was impractical to run exploits on machines when information about electronic tampering was harder to come by and when hacking meant opening up the door of a machine and tinkering with the circuitry. You'd have to avoid getting caught by anyone operating the establishment during what would likely be a lengthy process of trial and error with the system.

In the arcade, scores were generated and registered publicly. With online leaderboards, you often build the score privately, even when it is still publicly broadcast. Games can contain anti-cheat booby traps, but beyond that, as long as you've not obvious about it, you can upload an arbitrary score to the leaderboards and have it accepted. If you could manipulate an arcade machine, you'd spoil it for the people using that cabinet. If you hack a multiplayer match, you ruin that particular face-off. However, if you can get your fake score accepted to an online leaderboard, you effectively vandalise the game for everyone for as long as the servers stay up. Plus, the worldwide recognition the top 10 brings means that that's prime bait for an unscrupulous engineer.

Even if there was a magic spell that let you immediately rid a game of all the crafty goblins rewriting its leaderboards, traditional "top 10" lists of players provide an overly-daunting challenge for most competitors. If you have an arcade that sees hundreds of regular patrons and a cabinet that only honours ten, the large majority of people who play the machine will never have a chance at breaking into that league. Audiences are looking for achievable goals and steady progression, and moving into and up the ten top players in your area provides neither. However brilliant a mechanic you think leaderboards might be, most arcade players cannot interact with them, and what's the point of a feature that players don't engage with?

Soil for Leaderboards

The capacity of 21st-century servers elasticised leaderboards enough to include players worldwide, but this generated a new complication. More entries meant the rankings got granular, and the less it meant to move up one place. If I am promoted from 3rd place to 2nd, that's a leap no one could scoff at. If I advance from the 23,104th rung to the 23,103rd, who cares? And how skilled am I compared to the community as a whole? It's unclear. Leaderboards also don't integrate smoothly into games unless those games:

1. Have a scoring system.
2. Make players care about the score they rack up.
3. Let a considerable number of players enter the game and finish with substantially different scores.
4. Make competition one of their themes.
5. Ensure accumulating points doesn't conflict with other goals.

For our purposes, a "score" does not have to be a points total. It just has to be a number by which we can measure player performance. Under that definition, times on a race or numbers of collectables obtained can also be "scores", which is why some games can order leaderboards by them. To assert a scoring scheme, all games need to do is quantify achievement because a score is achievement quantified.

Racing games are ideal leaderboard candidates because every player has the same track to race (the content is relatively fixed), but finish times can differ by hundredths of a second (fulfilling our criteria that performance must be quantifiable and able to vary widely). Rhythm games work, too, because we all have the same note track, which moves at the same speed (so they're fixed). However, it's normal that there are hundreds of different notes on one of those highways, and many music titles like Cytus or Taiko no Tatsujin give us a different score for each note based on the timing with which we strike it (so performance is quantifiable and varies).

As you can tell from these examples, to make a viable leaderboard, we need to use not just the right game but also the right measure of aptitude at that game. It wouldn't make sense to rank people by their best placement for tracks in a racing game, for example, because your leaderboard is going to start with tens of thousands of people drawn for "1st place". And while we can score the drivers in racing games on time, this wouldn't fly in the rhythm game where the songs last the same length for every virtual musician.

Poison for Leaderboards

Let's think more about games incompatible with leaderboards. These tend to be games where our primary and even secondary interest can't be boiled down to a score or where those scores are going to be too similar. They tend to be games:

1. With little grey area between success and failure.
2. Where the experience is more about the journey rather than the points we scored by the end of it.
3. That want to foster cooperation or solo play more than competition.
4. That aren't appealing to traditional conceptions of wins and losses.

Adios is a sleepy but fatalistic first-person drama about a farmer sacrificing himself to arrest a cycle of violence. The object of the game is not to reason with your prospective killer as fast as possible or pick the "correct" dialogue. It's there so you can absorb a story and the day in the life of an agricultural worker. Score has no place here, and therefore, neither does a leaderboard. Venba is a cheerful frolic through South-Indian cooking that shows how food enriches the life of a family from that region. Not only is it not a candidate for scoring, but to invite in a leaderboard full of people from outside the diegesis is to break the fourth wall and ruin the close-knit family vibe. As the medium has increasingly broached real-world topics, ranking and scoring have seen their applicability recceed. A lot of real-world actions can't be said to be strictly superior or inferior to others, or at least, there's disagreement about whether they are, preventing designers from applying objective rubrics to them.

But even among the "gamey" games, there are sockets that leaderboards don't fit into. Imagine me and my fellow dwarves complete a hard day's mining in Deep Rock Galactic only to see a score screen headlined by the "best" miner. It would push a wedge between people who are trying to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with each other. I'm not going to say it's never the aesthetic that a co-op game aspires to. I am going to say that it rarely is.

In fighting games, you win a match, or you lose it. There's not a variable conception of success unless you're maybe speedrunning the story mode. You could try to rate players based on the amount of health or time they have left at the end of a match, but a lot of those scores are going to run together. More disconcerting, sacrificing health or time can actually be the correct move in a fighting game if it secures your victory, so attempting to use the clock or HP as a metric of success would be to misunderstand the goal and encourage counter-productive behaviour.

There are games where our macro-level success is measured in bosses beaten, puzzles solved, or areas uncovered, which also don't have the granularity and variation you'd need for a leaderboard. I'd forward Okami, Toonstruck, or The Last Case of Benedict Fox. A lot of players in those games are going to end up around the same waypoints, and once they've beaten the game once, they can't leapfrog anyone else's record. And if you are rating players by levels completed or speed of completion, you're punishing them for taking their time in areas. Players will often want to slow their roll to complete bonus objectives, gain more resources, or just soak in the atmosphere. Do you want to discourage that?

The original Super Mario Bros. defects in the other direction from these titles, yet still ends up unsuitable for leaderboard inclusion. SMB has a points tally, and sure, it's nice to see the numbers fly out when I stomp a Goomba or bump a block, but what would competing for the high score in this platformer look like? It would be tediously farming the points from the levels instead of moving ahead and keeping up Mario's lively pace. Nintendo could have written SMB's scoring scheme to be entirely focused on progression instead of the little bonuses like how many power-ups you collected or heads you jumped on. But then they'd be making each interaction with the world a little less valuable, and on a leaderboard, you'd just be giving players the number of levels they've completed in a less readable form, and again, most leaderboard scores would cluster together. You've no doubt recognised that these contentions aren't specific to Super Mario Bros. They'd apply to a preponderance of games. To be honest, most attempts at leaderboard placements involve copious points grinding.

Evolutionary Theory

We can describe any piece of media as "a product of its time", but when we say that, what we really mean by that is that something's a product of economic, technological, and cultural conventions of their generation. In a time when operators made their money by sucking as many coins as possible out of patrons, leaderboards were an incentive for players to hand over their wallets. And in an era when designers couldn't bake nearly as large a tray of levels for one game, leaderboards gave customers another reason to jump back in and keep slamming those buttons. Lastly, when every play session in arcades happened on someone else's machine, one not connected to the internet, designers could not have the player hang onto a lot of personal markers of achievement. Leaderboards were the closest thing they had to saving your progress.

This version of computer games could not be further from that of the last several console generations. Games now tend to be high-content and don't charge per session. Players also have persistent and comparatively large files in which they can store more signifiers of personal success, such as equipment, player level, and ranks. Many of these are more concrete and intuitive badges of progress than the long strings of numbers that indicated player skill on old-school leaderboards.

Then there's the internet. That really did change everything. The world used to exist in smaller bubbles with more identifiable boundaries that derived from our communities and were physically-based. Then a computer network started linking together a lot of people across the breadth of the planet, and those boundaries began to weaken. Local relationships that were the organising social infrastructure pre-internet were encroached upon by our interactions with the global crowd. Sometimes, we lost ourselves in that crowd. Sometimes, people like hackers used that network to tamper with other peoples' computers. Both were the case for anyone interacting with the leaderboard.

But that doesn't mean the internet is evil. Gentle reader, take a gander down at your system tray, and you'll see something amazing: you're on the internet right now. I'm going to talk about some modern games that have worked with contemporary technology and design to make the leaderboards cool and compelling in the online age. To stave off mission creep, I'll do that next week. Today, we've learned that leaderboards were part and parcel of a more localised and now largely bygone world, accompanied if not replaced for a lot of us by the connection the global network has given us to thousands of others. We've also covered how leaderboards derive from score, and therefore, fare better in games with objective but variable measures of success that are comfortable pitting players against each other, and that's not every game today. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Minecraft Font by Crafton Gaming.