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If the idea you're raging against is that there is no 6 hour experience worth $20, I'm totally behind you. But you take it a step further and accuse barrkel of

by bendotc 17y ago

If the idea you're raging against is that there is no 6 hour experience worth $20, I'm totally behind you. But you take it a step further and accuse barrkel of being a "tasteless slob" for not valuing World of Goo more than $2, and that's just ridiculous. It's precisely as ridiculous as if I called you a "tasteless slob" for what you were saying about all non-Orange-Box FPSes, 'cause there are a bunch of real gems out there. What's my point? My point is that there's a question of taste. We can of course still talk about craftsmanship and aesthetics in games, but to criticise someone simply for saying they like games with high replay value and this isn't it, that's ridiculous. You said you don't like FPSes that aren't from The Orange Box, which shows to me that there are some damn fine games that you don't value, but it would be silly of me to criticize you for not wanting to pay market price for them.

unalone 17y ago
I made a point to tell barrkel that I hadn't met him and that I wasn't intending my remarks personally. I don't feel comfortable judging somebody by what they write online. The friends I'm most in touch with from my hometown are gamers. By some standards I'm a gamer, though I'd disagree with the classification. So obviously I don't mean "everybody that plays games" when I refer to the "gaming community". That said: I stand by what I said to begin with. Does replay value matter in a game? Of course. Is a game without replay value worthless? Certainly not. If a game takes me six hours to beat and I willingly play through all six hours, I've spent as much time playing it as I'd spend on a two-hour movie if I'd watched it three times. So there's the first thing that I find offense in: The suggestion that something worth "only" six hours of time hasn't given me enough value. In the "gaming community" as I define it, having a game take up dozens of hours of your life isn't an offense. I've always disagreed with that. I remember having a conversation with a friend over Final Fantasy VII, which I played for an hour and then put away. "It takes a few hours to get good," was his mindset. I find that casual disregard for time appalling. The second thing I found offensive was the suggestion that World of Goo was worth only two dollars. Two dollars? I pay more than that for a fucking cheese steak! For five dollars I will pay a man to sizzle some meat for me and put it in a plastic bag. For two dollars I will pay a fast food chain for a plastic cup to pour syrup into. When two people spend $10,000 of their own money and countless months developing a gem of a puzzle game that takes a quarter of a day to beat—and it's taking me much longer than that, personally—I think it's worth more than 20 minutes' worth of minimum wage. Craft and finesse has become so devalued. I blame it on gamers, though "gamers" here is a category that includes a whole bunch of non-gamers, including a whole branch of programmers that I occasionally criticize here as well. It's this attitude that other people's work is meaningless, the attitude of FAIL and meh., where having twenty hours of gameplay is expected but making any of those twenty hours magical and beautiful is utterly disregarded. It's not every gamer, it's a specific sort of gamer, but it's a prevalent sort of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock. And it bugs me not just because it's obnoxious and tasteless, but because on the flip side we have a lot of tasteful people who argue that video games are not art, can never be art, and I disagree with them as well. I love video games. But it's hard to argue with those tasteful game-haters when the average gamer works to hard to convince others of his crippling tastelessness.
- barrkel 17y ago
  After reading you carefully, I believe you have a fundamental problem in your understanding of the world, and in particular, how economics works. Things don't have intrinsic value in and of themselves. The fact that something has had "$10,000 of their own money and countless months" invested in it does not mean that the end product is valuable. You appear to be subscribing to the labour theory of value here; it's like something out of Marx. My point is that I can choose to do multiple things with my next unit of time. I get to choose how I spend my time and money. By analysing my preferences, I can figure out how I value different ways of spending my time. And the fact is I only chose to spend about 6 hours playing something that cost me $20, while I spent perhaps $90 for over 1000 hours playing Far Cry / 2. If you work it out, you'll see $2 is actually pretty generous, as it includes the aspects of the WoG playing experience that can't be directly substituted by the FPSes, such as novelty and newsworthiness. Nevertheless, I regretted spending $20 on WoG. Not hugely, but I regretted it. Accuse me of tastelessness all you like. Perhaps taste, like value, is in the eye of the beholder. (Of course, when you factor in the cost of hardware and the like, the cost for me for various FPSes is actually pretty substantial; but these are sunk costs, and almost all of the resources save the graphics card are used in my day job anyhow.)
  - unalone 17y ago
    Reading comments on Hacker News isn't "reading carefully". We're operating on a pretty shallow level of conversation right now. What I find funny is that you chide me for assigning things an intrinsic value, and then go right ahead and try to assign a formula for value based on time played/money. You're doing exactly what you accused me of. And you're being far snottier about it than I am, which is also kind of funny, because I'm the one being the snob here. See, unlike you, I don't assign any monetary value to time. I don't divide twenty by six or a thousand by ninety to decide if something's been worth it. That's stupid, all due respect. I don't divide the hours I wear a shirt by the money I paid for it either. Instead, I value the experience of that time spent. I'll take six hours of unique, novel gameplay with gorgeous graphics and good music to a thousand hours looking at generic FPS, listening to generic FPS sound, playing what amounts to fairly generic gameplay. What I liked about Half-Life 2, actually, that made it worth my time, was that it had so many elements of gameplay merge into a fairly simple control set. Valve's flawed in a lot of ways, but when I spend time on their stuff they give me an experience. I mentioned the time and money those developers spent not because I think it makes their game more valuable, but because I empathize with them and with what they made. If we want to use another bullshit metric, 6hrs/2ppl = 3, whereas 1000hrs/550ppl = less than two, not to mention we're talking two games that cost obscene amounts of time/money to provide. So those two people are producing more than those 550, with less money spent. "Less money spent", that's another issue. See, I can't sympathize with your twenty dollars. It's twenty dollars. If you're cheap enough to regret a twenty dollar purchase, I think you're being kind of whiny. But what I can't stand are those games that take millions of dollars to make, but don't have any sort of ingenuity behind them. I think that's a horrible, horrible waste. Can't stand games that lack ingenuity. So for me, Far Cry is yet another disaster of a game, and World of Goo, while imperfect, is a small little gem. And that's why it offends me that the sort of person who would spend a thousand hours shooting pixels would hate on a title with an inventive physics system, especially when it was made both with money that wasn't that much on a huge scale but was a lot to the two people that had to spend it. In the case of Ubisoft, you have the opposite case: A hell of a lot of money burnt up because it really didn't matter much to the people who had to spend it.

by bendotc 17y ago

unalone 17y ago

I made a point to tell barrkel that I hadn't met him and that I wasn't intending my remarks personally. I don't feel comfortable judging somebody by what they write online. The friends I'm most in touch with from my hometown are gamers. By some standards I'm a gamer, though I'd disagree with the classification. So obviously I don't mean "everybody that plays games" when I refer to the "gaming community". That said: I stand by what I said to begin with. Does replay value matter in a game? Of course. Is a game without replay value worthless? Certainly not. If a game takes me six hours to beat and I willingly play through all six hours, I've spent as much time playing it as I'd spend on a two-hour movie if I'd watched it three times. So there's the first thing that I find offense in: The suggestion that something worth "only" six hours of time hasn't given me enough value. In the "gaming community" as I define it, having a game take up dozens of hours of your life isn't an offense. I've always disagreed with that. I remember having a conversation with a friend over Final Fantasy VII, which I played for an hour and then put away. "It takes a few hours to get good," was his mindset. I find that casual disregard for time appalling. The second thing I found offensive was the suggestion that World of Goo was worth only two dollars. Two dollars? I pay more than that for a fucking cheese steak! For five dollars I will pay a man to sizzle some meat for me and put it in a plastic bag. For two dollars I will pay a fast food chain for a plastic cup to pour syrup into. When two people spend $10,000 of their own money and countless months developing a gem of a puzzle game that takes a quarter of a day to beat—and it's taking me much longer than that, personally—I think it's worth more than 20 minutes' worth of minimum wage. Craft and finesse has become so devalued. I blame it on gamers, though "gamers" here is a category that includes a whole bunch of non-gamers, including a whole branch of programmers that I occasionally criticize here as well. It's this attitude that other people's work is meaningless, the attitude of FAIL and meh., where having twenty hours of gameplay is expected but making any of those twenty hours magical and beautiful is utterly disregarded. It's not every gamer, it's a specific sort of gamer, but it's a prevalent sort of gamer. The kind that argues that Bioshock is as valuable a contribution to society as the works of Joyce or the movies of Hitchcock. And it bugs me not just because it's obnoxious and tasteless, but because on the flip side we have a lot of tasteful people who argue that video games are not art, can never be art, and I disagree with them as well. I love video games. But it's hard to argue with those tasteful game-haters when the average gamer works to hard to convince others of his crippling tastelessness.

barrkel 17y ago
After reading you carefully, I believe you have a fundamental problem in your understanding of the world, and in particular, how economics works. Things don't have intrinsic value in and of themselves. The fact that something has had "$10,000 of their own money and countless months" invested in it does not mean that the end product is valuable. You appear to be subscribing to the labour theory of value here; it's like something out of Marx. My point is that I can choose to do multiple things with my next unit of time. I get to choose how I spend my time and money. By analysing my preferences, I can figure out how I value different ways of spending my time. And the fact is I only chose to spend about 6 hours playing something that cost me $20, while I spent perhaps $90 for over 1000 hours playing Far Cry / 2. If you work it out, you'll see $2 is actually pretty generous, as it includes the aspects of the WoG playing experience that can't be directly substituted by the FPSes, such as novelty and newsworthiness. Nevertheless, I regretted spending $20 on WoG. Not hugely, but I regretted it. Accuse me of tastelessness all you like. Perhaps taste, like value, is in the eye of the beholder. (Of course, when you factor in the cost of hardware and the like, the cost for me for various FPSes is actually pretty substantial; but these are sunk costs, and almost all of the resources save the graphics card are used in my day job anyhow.)
- unalone 17y ago
  Reading comments on Hacker News isn't "reading carefully". We're operating on a pretty shallow level of conversation right now. What I find funny is that you chide me for assigning things an intrinsic value, and then go right ahead and try to assign a formula for value based on time played/money. You're doing exactly what you accused me of. And you're being far snottier about it than I am, which is also kind of funny, because I'm the one being the snob here. See, unlike you, I don't assign any monetary value to time. I don't divide twenty by six or a thousand by ninety to decide if something's been worth it. That's stupid, all due respect. I don't divide the hours I wear a shirt by the money I paid for it either. Instead, I value the experience of that time spent. I'll take six hours of unique, novel gameplay with gorgeous graphics and good music to a thousand hours looking at generic FPS, listening to generic FPS sound, playing what amounts to fairly generic gameplay. What I liked about Half-Life 2, actually, that made it worth my time, was that it had so many elements of gameplay merge into a fairly simple control set. Valve's flawed in a lot of ways, but when I spend time on their stuff they give me an experience. I mentioned the time and money those developers spent not because I think it makes their game more valuable, but because I empathize with them and with what they made. If we want to use another bullshit metric, 6hrs/2ppl = 3, whereas 1000hrs/550ppl = less than two, not to mention we're talking two games that cost obscene amounts of time/money to provide. So those two people are producing more than those 550, with less money spent. "Less money spent", that's another issue. See, I can't sympathize with your twenty dollars. It's twenty dollars. If you're cheap enough to regret a twenty dollar purchase, I think you're being kind of whiny. But what I can't stand are those games that take millions of dollars to make, but don't have any sort of ingenuity behind them. I think that's a horrible, horrible waste. Can't stand games that lack ingenuity. So for me, Far Cry is yet another disaster of a game, and World of Goo, while imperfect, is a small little gem. And that's why it offends me that the sort of person who would spend a thousand hours shooting pixels would hate on a title with an inventive physics system, especially when it was made both with money that wasn't that much on a huge scale but was a lot to the two people that had to spend it. In the case of Ubisoft, you have the opposite case: A hell of a lot of money burnt up because it really didn't matter much to the people who had to spend it.