hello nfi it is thursday the 20th of
august 2020
video games
🎵 ukulele & glockenspiel intro to
Melodie for Melody by Charlie McDonnell 🎵
so recently there's been a discussion
about whether video games are too long.
and i think the correct answer to that
is
yeah they're probably too long for me,
but you know, not everything has to be
for me and that's okay.
so whatever.
there are plenty of short games out
there.
and if you like short games i would
recommend the channel first five which
reviews
short games or games as to whether
they're
good if you can only play them for a
short while. links in description. but a
lot of time
when people talk about short games
people bring up
uh the dollars to hour ratio. which is
basically uh how many dollars you spend
for how many hours you get out of the
game.
i guess if you divide the dollars by the hours in the game
you want to get a number that is as
small as possible.
and that's often not the case with very
short games.
however i think that equation should be
slightly different, i think it should be
dollars divided by hours in game
plus hours out of game.
so for example how much time you keep
thinking about the game, how much time
you keep talking about the game,
how much time you keep making fat art of
the game or
you know whatever else. um because there
can be very short games
and they inspire you to
you know still spend a lot of time with
them out of game. i guess the
most overdone example of that is Portal.
um it took me three hours to play
through it. but if you look online
the internet is full of fan art and
people talking about it and it's become
a massive
part of i guess online culture and pop
culture
in general. and i know that when i played
it i
was literally kept awake by thinking
about the puzzles.
um another one for me is The Charnel
House Trilogy. when i scrolled through my
library and i saw it
i had three and a half hours logged, i
was like,
that that can't be i must have spent
more time with that game. because it
feels like I have. but i know it's a
super short game.
and that three and a half hours includes
a replay even though the game is
basically not replayable. it's a linear
story and once you've
you know played through it you know the
story and you know the puzzles and
why would you replay it. but i did
because i loved the world
and you know the characters and
everything. but i also must have spent a
lot more time
thinking about it, because it feels like
i know it's so much better
than just three hours. meanwhile there
are other games that i have
much more hours and i'm like oh yeah
i've
spent 40 hours with that game, really? i
barely
remember anything. and that's obviously
not to say that only
short games can have that effect, i mean
my most played game is Skyrim and i
certainly spent a lot of time thinking
about Skyrim
outside of playing Skyrim. but i feel
like it's something that i would want to
include
into evaluating whether a game has been
worth
the amount of money i paid. now the
only problem with that is that you
don't know whether you like a game until
after you've played it.
and the dollars to hour ratio is probably
kind of thought up to
help you decide whether you want to you
know buy the game in the first place. so
nyeh... but yeah that's something i always
think about when
someone brings up dollar to hour ratio.
i'll
link some videos by other people who
also thought about this general subject
in other ways.
and uh why don't you tell me about games
that
inspired you a lot in one way or the
other i'd be quite curious about that.
and brendan we'll see you tomorrow.
bye
