The Power of Points in Passage and The Uber Game

Scoring is among the most fundamental mechanics in games of any kind, let alone video games. What makes a score compelling? Is it something in gameplay that highlights the value of scoring, or is it a score simply existing in the first place? Playing Passage and The Uber Game both played on my primal drive to score as many points as possible, but perhaps for the opposite reasons.

The sole affective mechanic the user has access to in The Uber Game is choice. Some choices in the game are directly financial cost-benefit analyses (should I buy the cleaning supplies? Should I risk chasing the surge?), while others deal in more personal stakes (should I help my son with his homework?), but ultimately all have some effect on your access to clientele, driving the ultimate point system of the game: money. The Uber Game presents a very simple objective: net $1000 by the end of the week, and you win. Fail to do that, and you lose. In The Uber Game, points are everything, and every decision you make redounds upon your ability to score points. There are certain complicating factors where the game forces the player to confront trade-offs of sympathy and self-care, but it’s a testament to the power of points, win/loss conditions, and video game storytelling that whether to help your fictional child or successfully pay your fictional interest payment can be a difficult and even emotional choice.

In Passage, however, no strict win/loss condition is articulated. The player is free to read their own meaning into the game. And yet, on secondary playthroughs, the choice of whether to travel with a companion or have an easier time navigating the space is a similarly difficult and even emotional decision. On my first playthrough, I didn’t even notice the partner character and simply explored the map searching for chests. It seemed the only active direction I could take from the game was the point counter going up each time I found a blue star in a chest, so I pursued that mission. Of course, the player character inevitably dies at the end of the five minute period regardless of the player’s actions- but until then, the point system was my only fixation for meaning-making. After realizing the game’s eventual conceit, I was reminded of games like Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros., where a point system is presented despite the game providing the player much more fleshed out immediate objectives. Without these objectives, it becomes just one more rung to cling to of an invisible ladder. With them present, it offers a secondary approach to the game experience for those tired of the original narrative mission.

Ultimately, The Uber Game and Passage present opposite extremes of how even something as simple as a point system can generate dynamic modes of interactivity. Each of these games fundamentally prioritizes choice, whether it’s the series of determinant this-or-that decisions presented in The Uber Game or the much more open concept do-whatever-you-want (it doesn’t matter) style of Passage. Whether the choice inputs and presentation concepts are maximally interactive or hardly have any effect, these scoring systems highlight one of the most fundamental powers of gaming: that meaning can be drawn from something as simple as a few numbers, buttons, and light.