Gamer's Perspective

Statistics are everywhere you look in the world of gaming, there's just no escaping their overwhelming presence. There seems to be a certain monomania surrounding them that surely needs to be mollified before it gets out of hand. Just about any game from the last 5 years comes tagged with a plethora of facts and figures that serve little or no purpose: How many bullets you've fired, how many headshots you've amassed, even how many steps you've walked through the entirety of your journey. Is this really necessary? Do we really need to know how long we've been playing a game to the nearest millisecond? Does it enhance our gaming experience in any way? Or does it just feed our meaningless obsession with numbers.

It's the exact same way with most websites. We have points and percentages coming out of our ears; monitoring each and every aspect of our time on each site. Why do we need to know how many people have visited our profiles in the last month or how many millions of messages we have read? They surely serve no purpose but no provide users with bragging rights; it just feels like we're letting these numbers control us. There are countless forumites I know who simply won't sign out until their post count ends with a zero; yes some people really do take it to such extremes. It doesn't matter if the quality of their posting suffers as a result, as long as they reach that next milestone then its job done as far as they're concerned.

The latest trend in the world of game-related statistics is the addition of GamerScores for the Xbox 360; we have respected members of this and other communities who openly admit to playing games solely to boost their overall score. It doesn't matter if the game is utter trash, they will plough through endless hours of gameplay just to unlock the next achievement. It's thing's like this that make you seriously challenge the integrity of certain individuals, yes a bit of friendly rivalry never hurt anyone but playing through a bunch of terrible titles for a few points surely takes away the 'point' of gaming in the first place.

So next time you're playing a game and it pops up with some random statistic or you're in a thread and someone ranked level 30+ gains more respect than someone in single digits ask yourself what the point is? Is our society really driven by a bunch of statistics?

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By Craig Bryan Gamer's Perspective