Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror(one of the few blogs I plucker and read on the way to work every day) wrote an interesting article about how highscore tables are useless:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000717.html

First of all, I fully agree with him that asking users for data like blood type and age probably doesn’t make too much sense(for an European, that is). But I cannot agree with his core statement - highscore tables have a very good reason d’etre:

Replayability

Back in the days of games like Galaga et al, technology wasn’t as advanced as it is today - thus, multiple levels, etc aren’t available as an instrument to increase the replay value of the game. But if people play a game only once and then get bored by it, Arcade owners aren’t likely to stock it and the manufacturer will soon be broke.

So, in order to create replayability, game designers decided to create a new and simple thing that hooked into the competitive part of human’s brains. I am better than foo, I beat foo, that part of your grey control mass.

Space Invaders started the trend off by counting the amount of “kills” and putting the number up for others to compare against. This worked well, and Asteroids eventually made the thing even more competitive by adding in the nickname of the achiever. Essentially, people began to go like: I, TVH can beat FOO’s score - and will play until I achieve this.

Nowadays, the days of the arcade are gone - but high score tables can still be used to give challenge to otherwise-boring game ideas. Think of stuff like that ribbon game - it would be boring without the high score. Or think of Tetris without its levels.

To cut a long story short, high scores do have a good reason. I’d actually like to hear some comments here - please tell us what you think!