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| - In most sports and a number of video games, Scoring Points is the best way to keep track of your success. But when you think about it, what is a point? Can you quantify its value? Is a point in one game necessarily as valuable as a point in another game? Think about such things long enough, and you may come to the conclusion that a point is really nothing more than a bizarre variation of currency, easily redeemed for fame and glory. And like currency, it can be subject to Ridiculous Future Inflation. Some games are simply more generous with their scoring systems than others. Some games will give you 10 points for an action that would earn you 100 points in another. Zeros are particularly easy to append to scores. Yet in the end, the extra powers of 10 are meaningless and serve only to make one's performance look that much more impressive. There is a practical variant of this technique, in which the smaller, meaningless digits are used for a purpose separate from scoring as many points as possible. When used this way, the score is really more like two scores placed end to end. Another aspect to this trope is how the same "point" in different games can mean wildly different things. Some games have your Hit Points Cap at 999, others at thousands of times that. Getting 150 gold from a monster in one game can buy you a new piece of armor, while in another game it isn't even enough for a measly potion. And that's even if Adam Smith wouldn't hate your guts in the game itself. One reason these inflated point counts happen is due to a handful of natural human biases. We like big numbers yet are also somewhat bad at them especially in comparison on the fly. 10 is more than 1. 10,000 is basically the same as 1,000 (as far as a ratio goes), but it seems like a lot more at first glance. Even when we start to break it down, we can trigger various human faults over how much we're getting and how much there is actually. It's very likely that early pinball designers inflated scores purely for the ability to state that you can earn more points than a competitors and thus players of said machine were better despite, as this trope points out, it being an arbitrary distinction. Of course, once we start doing this sort of inflation, we also tend to move our internal definition of 'average'; a pinball machine that gave you scores in the 10s would, at first glance, look and feel much less impressive without some sort of context to justify it. The point-value equivalent of Rank Inflation. Compare Money for Nothing, where this applies to currency instead of points. The same reason apply though; we feel special and powerful if we can casually buy something that costs 1500 (whatevers)... even if the relative value would make it equivalent to a 15 point item using a reduced currency count. See also Trope 2000, another area in which extra 0s are added for the Rule of Cool. Examples of Pinball Scoring include:
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