Score
It functions as a social bragging right, a way of sizing people up, a quick reminder of one’s accomplishments. But there is a tension between social “score”, ie the way other players/people evaluate your accomplishments and the actual number. Should we come up with a simple figure and let the players/people do the real reputational math. Or is it best to keep track of it all?
I’m working on this problem for a design doc I’m writing and am leaning towards a (ultimately biased) system that keeps track of things carefully to award a more realistic number for peoples actions, mostly prompted by how fake score systems in multiplayer FPS are most of the time. Kill Death ratio, one used by a lot of players (this being a socially propogated idea that has now been taken up by devs for stat tracking) and now games, isn’t a very good measure either.