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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Hm. I can't go along with the general love-fest over World of Goo.

I bought World of Goo for $20 in large part because of the hullabaloo around it, and completed it in an evening. It was basically a bridge-builder derivative, where it's fun to overcome all the challenges, but once overcome, the desire to improve on them with economizing / scoring is a lot less. I got about 6 hours at most play time out of it.

If I valued the games I've enjoyed for replay value with a similar price / playtime equation, such as Far Cry or Far Cry 2, I'd have to conclude I should value them in excess of $500 apiece. First person shooters, when executed well, completely blow away puzzle games in replay value.

I would rather value WoG at about $2 at most. I'm not sure I'm any better off for having bought it, other than knowing that I don't want to play it again.

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The desire that's built in is the online tower building. But I don't do it for that. I do it for the thrill of seeing how efficiently I can make my pieces.

The graphics are beautiful. The soundtrack is incredible. The humor is perfectly executed. The feel of the controls I hope to one day equal. The physics engine's to die for.

I don't know you, barrkel, so hopefully you don't take it personally when I say: You'd value that package at two dollars? Pathetic. This is what I hate about the gaming community. You said you got six hours of play out of it, and don't think that was worth $20? I pay $10 for a CD with 40-60 minutes of music on it. I pay $15 for a 3-hour movie. This masterpiece of a puzzle game you value at two dollars. Unbelievable.

It's worth mentioning that I can't stand most first-person shooters. The Orange Box ones (Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal) are the only ones I've played and liked. The level of workmanship on the average FPS saddens me. They strike me as gimmicky and cheap.

I can't comment on how long it takes to beat World of Goo, because I haven't beat it yet. I'm on the second world out of, what, six?, and I've played it for a few hours. I spent an hour alone trying to hit the challenge records on each level. But the game isn't just about beating levels. It's about the joy of putting things together, seeing what works and what doesn't.

All that was released by a team of two people. Far Cry was made by a team of five hundred people, and it's nowhere near as sleek as World of Goo. I think 2D Boy puts Crytek to shame. They're entrepreneurs and artists and I wish them the best of luck—and it really pisses me off when the tasteless slobs that call themselves the gaming community decide to shit all over a good thing.

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.

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.

"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."

Oh, I know you! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=304895

You're still wrong about Bioshock, though I've changed my tune about Portal since that thread. Still, thanks for painting me (and I suspect barrkel) with a broad and inaccurate brush stroke.

The funny thing is, we probably agree on more than we disagree. I think the drive for longer games is ridiculous. I roll my eyes when people are upset at the idea of paying $20 for a 6 hour game on the principle that the game should be longer. Also, I got a college degree basically studying the aesthetics of games and have worked in the industry since then, so you could say that making good, interesting, beautiful games is important to me in that I've put my money (and life) where my mouth is.

I probably think a game you like is crap, and I know I like a game you think is crap, but the big difference is, I don't think that makes you "obnoxious and tasteless," I just think it means we have different tastes, or at worst, I think you're wrong.

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.)

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.

A few points:

* The worth of something to an individual isn't an intrinsic value; it's either a use value (they'll consume it) or an exchange value (they'll buy it, and perhaps sell it at some other point).

* I don't assign monetary value to my time out of habit, but sometimes quantitative tools are useful for analysing decisions. That's how economics works: it's about analysing choice.

* You persist in talking about generic FPSes. I am specifically not talking about generic FPSes.

* You can empathise with one group of developers all you like, but I can guarantee you there are lots more, and larger, groups of developers elsewhere that you are explicitly choosing not to empathise with. It sounds like you're making a moral argument, but I would posit that the utilitarian balance of your position is unsound.

* I'm cheap enough to regret mistakes, because if you don't regret mistakes, you won't learn from them, and you'll end up losing far more than $20.

I played the game when it first came out too; and I agree with Barrkel somewhat.

I think calling it a masterpiece of a puzzle game is a bit too much; it was hard in places, true, and amusing to play - but not actually particularly challenging (that's a good thing).

I wouldn't value it at $2 - maybe 4 or 5.

Lets compare some FPS games though (a difficult comparison really). Firstly L4D; you should give it a shot because it is hard to fault the execution of the game. On hardest difficulty and with some good mates you can literally spend a couple of hours fighting through one level :D

HL2? Worth it for the beautiful set pieces (even if it is very linear).

Assassins Creed was also a fun game and quite comparable to WoG. It's essentially a puzzle game at it's core; and the obsession I personally had to perfect each "kill" was easily worth the $40 I paid for it.

Ultimately though we have to compare COD4. The single player is exquisite and is approximately 6 hours of game play. They weighting of the game is excellent and the "levels" are varied. And to top it off the story is excellent. Easily worth the money I paid for it.

Im not saying WoG is valueless but I get the impression your setting a lot of stock by the fact these are indie game developers; meaning the risk was much higher and they did it for the love of the game etc. Which is fair enough; but lets compare WoG to the other free "indie" games you see kicking around the internet. Compared to them it is a wonderful masterpiece and achievement. But a value of $20? COD4 at $40 sounds like a bargain by comparison :)

Yes, two dollars, when compared with the value I get out of a decent FPS.

It's funny you mention the orange box; Portal is another puzzle game, and similarly not particularly replayable after solving it, which similarly takes about 6 hours.

And as for Half-Life 2, Ep 1 and 2, these are some of my least favourite FPSes because they are obsessively linear and don't reward creative approaches. For these reasons, they are more like a movie, and don't have particularly good replay value (IMHO).

Far Cry, on the other hand, was a masterpiece of playability, leaps and bounds ahead of any Half Life game, again IMHO. The freedom to tackle each situation resulted in large rewards to creativity.

Far Cry 2 took it even further; rather than just having to tactically plan one's approach to action bubbles, one needed to plan an entire navigation across the map, avoiding guard posts, road patrols, etc. I've never played a more immersive game than Far Cry 2, a game that took me to another world, save perhaps Outcast or Thief.

Yes, two dollars, when compared with the value I get out of a decent FPS.

The key word in that sentence is "decent", and I don't think it's the word you wanted.

Games like Far Cry, TF2, etc., are outliers, they're not "a decent FPS". I doubt you'd be willing to pay full price for a "decent" FPS, if you value World of Goo at $2.

It's interesting how skewed the perception of value can become due to AAA titles with huge budgets. Yes, in some ways these games ARE underpriced, and forcing a race to the bottom. You get silly situations like people paying $40 for L4D and playing it for hundreds of hours, while still complaining about the lack of content. The only conceivable scenario under which L4D is bad value is if you compare it to, say, TF2 - which is receiving ridiculous amounts of free content upgrades, in my opinion.

If you set your "baseline" for value to something like TF2 or Starcraft, then work downwards from there for all other games, then where does that leave the rest of the industry?

If you use that baseline, is WoW worth the $15 a month that millions of people happily pay?

Or, if you work the other way - if WoW IS worth $15 a month, which many people obviously agree - then doesn't that bring Far Cry closer to hundreds of dollars of "value"?

I'm not talking about what specific games you or I enjoy - I'm trying to play along with extracting some abstract "value", regardless of genre. My only conclusion is that you can't really do that - bad games are vastly overpriced, good games are vastly underpriced, and the only ones that get the pricing right are MMOs.

In my opinion, $20 for World of Goo is about right, assuming you enjoy that kind of game. It's short, but intensely enjoyable. I'd rather have 6 hours of excellent, memorable gameplay than dozens of hours of mediocre gameplay.

No, I think "decent" is the word I wanted, and of course it is a subjective opinion.

For comparison, a game that is not particularly AAA (certainly not by today's standards) would be something like Civ 2; this is another decent game that has huge replay value. If WoG had replay value similar to it, then I would have really gotten my money's worth, from my perspective.

But then you go on to make a rather odd argument, which seems to me to be moral in nature, suggesting that I should feel bad because I like getting lots of stuff for very little cost. Well I'm sorry, I don't see it that way; the key advantage of software in a global economy is that marginal cost is tiny, so excellent content should be cheap.

And the experiences I've gotten out of games like Far Cry, Thief, Civ 2, etc., have been infinitely more memorable than the gameplay I've had from WoG.

Thief: once, when looting a room, I was surprised to hear a guard say "what's going on here then", and I was just able to avoid detection by nipping into the shadow behind a pillar. When I was playing it, it affected me so deeply I walked down the street differently after sundown.

Far Cry: the experience of coming out of the cave where you wake up, and into the lush Pacific island environment, was amazing; one of the first things I did after I got my hands on my first jeep was drive through at relatively high speed past most of the mercs on that first level, all the way to cliff looking towards the aircraft carrier, and jumping out at the last moment, and watching my jeep sail over, crash and explode at the bottom. It was cinematic, unscripted, and I was in control.

Civ 2: Well, every time I get into that game, and I can still get into it now over a decade later, I build a country that becomes part of me, the names and locations of the cities familiar. It becomes my own territory, a place I feel at home.

WoG: it's a puzzle game, it's a bit like those ad-sponsored flash timewasters, only drawn out and developed a bit more. But I just don't see it as being particularly valuable. Sorry for feeling happy about having that judgement.

Civ II isn't AAA? Sid Meier is one of the biggest names in gaming.

Look, you're taking games that belong on any Top 100 of All Time list, and calling them "decent". What is an exceptional game, then?

And the experiences I've gotten out of games like Far Cry, Thief, Civ 2, etc., have been infinitely more memorable than the gameplay I've had from WoG.

I can accept that perfectly well. Of course it's not everyone's cup of tea. It's when we start trying to define "value" that things get a bit hairy.

I try not to play games that wouldn't appear in a top 100 list.

I only have limited time to play games, why wouldn't I have high standards?

I'm in the same situation. I just don't think "decent" is the right way to describe these games.

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