Game will show most recent score instead of high score

[BryceAG]

Test device:
Bates, Disessa, Tycho

Operating System:
Windows 7, iOS 9.2, iOS 9.3 beta

Browser:
Chrome, Safari

Problem description:
If you play a level of the game and do worse than the previous time you played that level, it will show the more recent score instead of the high score like the other sims with games do.

Steps to reproduce:
Play a level and score at least one point, then play again and score less than the previous score.

Severity:

Screenshots:
Here I have 12 points in level one:

Here I have 0 points without hitting the reset button:

Troubleshooting information (do not edit):
Name: Balancing Act
URL: http://phet.colorado.edu/sims/html/balancing-act/latest/balancing-act_en.html
Version: 1.0.2
Features missing: touch
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36
Language: en-US
Window: 1366x667
Pixel Ratio: 1/1
WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium)
GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium)
Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL)
Vertex: attribs: 16 varying: 9 uniform: 253
Texture: size: 8192 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 4, combined: 20)
Max viewport: 8192x8192
OES_texture_float: true

[jbphet]

The game was designed this way, but I believe we've undergone some evolution on our thinking on this since the last publication of this sim. Assigning to @ariel-phet to say whether the current behavior should be retained (sim shows most recent results on level selection buttons) or changed to where the highest score is shown on the buttons.

[jbphet]

I just checked Area Builder, and it also shows the most recent score, not the highest.

[jbphet]

I just checked Graphing Lines, and that shows highest score on level selection. @phet-steele just checked Fraction Matcher, and that retains the high score as well. This doesn't really seem to me like something that should vary from sim to sim. @ariel-phet - we should make a call about what the PhET standard should be, high score or recent score, and the level selection buttons.

[ariel-phet]

@phet-steele can you edit this list of sims with scored games with "stars" and level selection screens and note which paradigm they currently follow and then reassign to me

• Area Builder (retains last score)
• Arithmetic (retains last score)
• Balancing Act (retains last score)
• Balancing Chemical Equations (retains high score)
• Build an Atom (retains high score)
• Fraction Matcher (retains high score)
• Graphing Lines (retains high score)
• RPAL (retains high score)

[phet-steele]

@ariel-phet there you go, I added Arithmetic.

[ariel-phet]

This item would be good to discuss at status meeting and have a "codified" standard going forward.

1. As I recall the argument for retaining the high score was that is how many modern games work, however since we do not label the stars as "high score" or "best" this seems a bit unclear to the user.
2. For a classroom use I could see an advantage to always showing the most recent score, if you are asking a student to repeat a level/game several times.

Somewhat agnostic, but agree with @jbphet we should be consistent across games

[jbphet]

This is the only remaining issue blocking a new RC for this sim, so I'm marking as high priority. If we can't come to a consensus now, I can just publish using the current behavior, but I'd like for this to be a conscious decision.

[ariel-phet]

At status meeting, @kathy-phet said that retaining most recent score should become our standard.

Reassigning to @jbphet (feel free to have @phet-steele make issues in other repos)

[jbphet]

Closing, since we decided to standardize on the behavior currently implemented in this sim.

[pixelzoom]

Reopening.

Several GitHub issues have been assigned to me to standardize this in other sims. So I'd like to add my 2 cents before making those changes.

Possible issues with showing the "last score", instead of the "best score":

(1) There will be no record of what the student's best score has been on a level.

(2) There will be no way to know whether the student's current attempt at a level surpassed their previous best score. In games, this is a big motivator for repeated play.

(3) Once the student has achieved a perfect score, they will be disinclined to repeat a level, for fear of losing that level's score on the level-selection screen.

All of the above are the reasons why "best score" is the standard in games. And the bottom line is that it motivates repeated play towards the goal of getting a perfect (or highest) score on all levels.

[pixelzoom]

@ariel-phet asked me to:
(1) create a more general issue at phetsims/vegas#51
(2) note the Arithmetic issue at phetsims/arithmetic#173
(3) close this issue

[pixelzoom]

Reopening, related to phetsims/graphing-lines#61.

@jbphet If you're showing recent scores, then why does the model have {Property.<number>[]} bestScore?

At line 285 of BalanceGameModel, you're simply setting the level's best score to the most recent score:

285  this.bestScores[ this.level ].value = this.score;

And you're also passing one of the Properties from bestScore to each level-selection button.

So it looks to me like you changed the semantics to "most-recent score", but left all of the variable names as "best". If that's indeed the case, it's misleading.

[pixelzoom]

This sim also seems to be tracking "best time", see screenshot below. If you're showing recent score, why you showing best time? That sure seems confusing - is it intentional?

[ariel-phet]

Removing assignee until sim is revisited

[marlitas]

We probably want to revisit this for the upcoming publication, or at least confirm we're okay with what's going on right now. I don't know what the standard is right now. @kathy-phet can you help provide some clarity?

also my unasked two cents agrees with @pixelzoom... it seems bizarre to track most recent score and not highest score in a game.

[amanda-phet]

Discussed in phetsims/vegas#51 (comment)

We'd like the level selection screen to show best score, not recent score.

[Luisav1]

The best score is now shown on the level-selection screen. Closing.

[Luisav1]

Reopening this issue because it's been a long-standing problem. It relates to standardizing the game score behavior across multiple simulations. Leaving it open for QA to review during dev testing seems like the best approach.

[Nancy-Salpepi]

This looks good in 1.3.0-dev.1.
Closing!