Right as rainy

Back in the day of the point & click adventure games, a lot of titles had a scoring system. Every correct action in the game, every successful dialogue, every useful item (and some less useful ones) rewarded the player with a number of points. The objective, of course, was to finish the game with the maximum score, or to get as close to it as possible. It was something that added to the game (or tried to do so), provided for some bragging rights and maybe even made it worthwhile to play the game again.

For some time, as the classic adventure games lost popularity to other genres, the concept was forgotten. Until the console world picked it up again in a slightly different fashion. On the XBox 360, every retail game is worth 1000 points in so-called gamerscore. Since not every game comes with enough story or dialogue or items to adapt the concept 1:1, they had to come up with a few other ideas. The answer is Achievements – milestones scattered throughout the game, each worth a number of points.

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