How Neon White brought back the leaderboard chase

polygon.com:

When picking up the first-person shooter Neon White, I was astounded at how much I felt compelled to play, and then replay, the individual levels. The shooter transports players into linear courses where you run though as quickly as possible and use cards that give your character special powers, like bombs or an additional jump. The grind in Neon White felt enjoyable in and of itself — yet out of seemingly nowhere, I became the kind of player who whittled down my time by mere milliseconds. Part of this joy was no doubt due to mechanical minutiae, but there is one aspect that stood out even more: the leaderboards.

In Neon White, each level has a global leaderboard in addition to a smaller leaderboard that’s shared among your friends list. While leaderboards have played a central role in video games since the era of arcade cabinets, Neon White made me care about my scores for the first time in recent memory. Polygon sat down with game lead Ben Esposito over Zoom to talk about the unique implementation of leaderboards in Neon White, how they influenced the game, and and how social elements can help modern games stand out even more.

According to Esposito, the team had the idea of competing for better times in mind “from the beginning.” It all started in 2018, when Esposito had burned through a few failed demo ideas for a card-based first person shooter. He had the idea of making a shooter-platformer where you get cards randomly and fight through arenas. The designer said that playing with random weapons all the time “wasn’t very fun.” Nonetheless, that demo led to one last demo focused on linear levels with a set number of cards. Esposito sent the demo to a friend, and the friend sent Esposito back a list of times it took