The game I played in class today is called “The Score” and it was programmed by MachineScreen. The Score takes place during a dystopian future where individuals are assigned a “attractiveness” score, and given potential “attractiveness” scores of your progeny in the form of an expected score, which can be higher or lower based on randomness. During The Score, you use a Tinder-like interface to accept or reject potential mates, with the aim of creating an offspring with a 100 rating: as the game describes it, “genetic perfection”. Each generation, you adopt the score of the highest rated child and continue the game until you reach 100.
The game starts off relatively easy, as the majority of individuals that you match with always give you a higher rating than you started. However, as the game moves on, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a mate. Mostly all the numbers being presented to you are lower, and you have a limited amount of time to find a partner, so often during gameplay I was forced to breed with someone that would allow me to have a offspring (“good enough”), and rejecting more than a hundred other individuals, who weren’t high enough to be productive.
The Score’s narrative satirizes dating apps like Tinder and stretches them to the extreme of being a eugenics program. It uses its gameplay as the vehicle to deliver commentary on both concepts. You reject hundreds of users because they don’t have a high enough potential rating, passing over people who could have been acceptable partners if the point wasn’t to increase your rating. And since this sort of program is within the universe, it bizarre premise is never questioned or examined in any sense: it’s just how it works.
I would consider The Score to be a “cyborg game” due to how its story and commentary lie in the gameplay rather than any sort of in-game dialog. In more traditional games, characters interactions and their environment would be the source of the story and give context to the gameplay. For example, in Halo, you are a marine fighting aliens, and that’s why you have a gun and it can shoot. To subvert this, The Score uses its gameplay to provide its story. No dialogue or characters are necessary, only context and the progression within the game. Due to this inversion of typical gameplay structure, The Score is subverting the video game genre that it was created in, thus, we can view The Score as being a “cyborg game”.
