This is a direct follow up to 2 previous posts of mine : The Opportunity Cost of Skips
& The Opportunity Cost of Quick Kills so check those out, I'm assuming you've read them
Even though scoring and speed play of all types is comparable in many different ways from both a player's and designer's perspective, there are some interesting differences between the two.
Scoring is additive, while speed play is subtractive.
This is very obvious if you think about it, but this seemingly minor difference creates a very strong safety net against mechanics & actions with a high opportunity cost.
Because speed play is subtractive, the goal will always be to reduce the amount of engagement with a game's elements like levels, enemies, and so on. This presents a problem because there's a risk that players will optimize their way into not engaging with the game at all. Entire runs will come down to a few highly difficult skips, missing out on a ton of micro-optimization opportunities that the skipped parts of the games were full of.
The problem can be fixed with anti-skipping measures, but this undermines a big appeal of speed play. It punishes players for exploring levels & mechanics, it doesn't give them those exciting high risk high reward moments, it doesn't let players truly own their strats or feel smart, it doesn't let them enjoy [~ OOB Aesthetics ~]. So developers are stuck in a situation where all paths forward suck ass.
The additive nature of scoring helps alleviate this. Scoring is the only way to reward engaging with the game as much as possible. In fact, the scoring equivalent of skips (a strat that overwhelms the rest of the game's content and makes it harder to enjoy) would be milking - which is engaging with content too much. The exciting high risk, high reward nature of skips comes in the form of scoring tricks - specific moments of a run where players go for all-or-nothing strats. They carry the same excitement as a well executed skip, often being highly technical, tense moments that are often clearly unintended. Yet they have very low opportunity cost - the player's most likely only missing out on whatever challenge they'd be doing in the seconds it takes to do said trick.
Of course this is very generalized. Games with resource-based scoring systems can encourage hoarding resources for specific spots & tricks, making the moment-to-moment play boring since you never get to play around with said resources. The specific types of scoring strats games encourage can also end up having a high opportunity cost - if a game has a rich moveset but only encourages parry spam, then it's a huge missed opportunity to test a variety of skills. On average though, the opportunity cost is lower, and anything "broken" simply gets sucked back into the game's meta without undermining much of anything.
The only cost is that you've gotta accept the incredibly abstract, hard-to-grasp nature of scoring systems compared to the intuitive, immediately understandable metric of time.
There are ways to bridge this gap. Marble It Up! is a speed-based game which has item pickups that slow the in-game clock. Effectively, it detaches speed play from real time, bringing it closer to the additive systems you see in scoring. This keeps the positives of time, while also doing a good job at disincentivizing skips. Tying speed gain to interacting with as much of a level as possible is another way out, though that might be even less intuitive than scoring. By thinking in terms of minimizing opportunity cost, devs can squeeze out their game's depth juices and increase the amount of interaction happening, it just requires some effort and outside the box thinking.
