Lost in the Numbers: The Annoying Trend of Meaningless Stats in AAA Games

Recently, while I was watching the new footage of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, I was overcome with a very particular flavor of ennui. Specifically, during the parts where they were highlighting the gear system, I thought to myself, “wow, look at all those meaningless statistics and numbers.”

Now, I have my own reservations about Suicide Squad, but I’ll save those for when the game actually comes out. The more important thing here is the visceral reaction from myself, as well as much of the gaming public, to the sight of all those numbers. It’s a symptom of an ongoing trend in games, mostly triple-A ones, in which the entire game becomes a matter of rubbing numbers against other numbers.

The Number Wars

To paraphrase a wiser man than me, something that makes certain genres and subsets of games distinctive from others is their heavy reliance on numbers as a baseline mechanic. After all, any game with an equipment system is all about the numbers, more or less; the biggest numbers on your weapons, the biggest numbers on your armor, and so on.

However, there’s an ocean of difference between the usage of numbers in, say, an RPG versus the current number-heavy trend. In a turn-based RPG, for instance, the numbers usually serve as an abstraction of your physical traits, Dungeons & Dragons-style, and they don’t often get too carried away with it. You got your strength, your defense, your intelligence, your luck, and maybe a couple of others.

But certain modern games can’t seem to just leave the matter at that. They keep attaching numbers to aspects of your character that nobody would really bother to track otherwise, sometimes even going as far as making up an entire statistic just to have another place to stick a number. I don’t think it’d be unreasonable to say that any character statistic with a name that’s three or more words long does not need to be tracked separately.

Now, why is this the way it is? Well, I can think of an optimistic reason and a cynical reason. The optimistic reason is that the game wants to give you a lot of fine control over your character, gear, and playstyle, and minute statistics are the best way to do it. The cynical reason is that your brain likes seeing numbers go up, so having more numbers plastered all over the place means more opportunities for dopamine hits.

The Numerical Distinction

As I mentioned before with RPGs, some games, by nature, need to have an overabundance of numbers, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. If you were playing a grand strategy game, for instance, there are definitely a lot of numbers going on there. That makes sense; you’re managing an entire army or civilization, so there are going to be plenty of statistics to keep track of.

I think the problem arises when you try to cram that level of number-tracking into a game that shouldn’t really have it. Certain genres of games are better suited to raw player skill and gut feelings than numerical abstraction, so when you dump a bunch of numbers all over them, it just feels like a barrier to actually playing the game.

The best genres to point to for this type of game are probably shooters and fighters. In the Borderlands series, for instance, every weapon is randomly generated, so any one of your weapon’s stats could have potential pluses and minuses that you have to keep track of in a gear window. The games try to alleviate that a bit with the overall Gear Score system, abstracting the gun’s overall value with a single number at the top, but because your potential weapons are so different from one another, that Gear Score is usually inaccurate, at least as far as your playstyle is concerned. Call me a caveman, but when I pick up a gun in a shooter, I just want it to shoot things. I don’t need a spreadsheet of information telling me the exact degree to which it’s effective against fleshy enemies.

For fighting games, Mortal Kombat 11 was a good example of a game that didn’t need a numerical element. Fighting games are supposed to be about skill, reflexes, and putting the lab time in. Covering your characters in random bits of mismatched armor to tweak their punching and kicking stats just raises the skill ceiling further, locking out players who can’t be bothered to grind for hours on end to get the best kicking shoes for Scorpion. Granted, most of that game’s players just ignored the gear system for the most part, but that just means it was a bunch of meaningless work for a feature no one asked for.

Where’s the Median?

It’s not a terrible idea to have some manner of numerical mechanic in your action games, so long as it’s not intrusive. A flat character level, little buffs to a gun’s functions rather than full read-outs on its stats, or a skill level for matchmaking are all perfectly sound notions.

I think perhaps the number flood is based on the assumption that all players want to get in on grind mindset, that we all want to be the absolute best at whatever game we’re playing. Maybe in an online game like World of Warcraft, but in what is supposed to be a solo, self-contained experience, it’s just a hindrance.

Remember when Marvel’s Avengers was first teased and it looked like a traditional linear action brawler? And then it actually came out and we all found out it was actually a random mission-based looter shooter? I’m still of the opinion that if that game had just stuck to its guns and focused on telling a cool linear story, it would’ve had a much better reception. But when you bog down a game with all these extraneous numbers with the intent of creating an infinitely-replayable live service, you don’t encourage people to play it, you make it harder for them to play it.

We’re getting into overall industry ethics here, so let’s wrap it up. The bottom line is that, if you want to make a game for people to enjoy, the best way to do that is to exemplify its bedrock mechanics. If those mechanics necessitate numbers like an RPG, that’s fine. But if the bedrock is just “shoot stuff in a cool way,” then all we need to do is shoot stuff. We don’t need to shoot stuff with a randomly-generated epic-tier assault rifle with +30% damage when fighting purple robots on a Tuesday.