Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Even the direct comparison of time to money is something that is a given in our
mental approaches to life. We often get paid a specific rate of money per hour. We
rent cars, apartments, and carpet steam-cleaners in dollars per day. Even without
being explicitly addressed, people will make the comparison. For example, paying
$50 for a video game that has only two hours worth of gameplay content and zero
replayability would likely make a few people grumble. If they took the time to think
about it, they have paid $25 per hour for the privilege of playing the game.
However, a role-playing game (RPG) that managed to offer up 50 hours' worth of
gameplay drops the rate to $1 per hour… a much more respectable number.
Notice that the above rates are all expressed in the form of the amount of
money
spent per a fixed amount of
time
. It would seem that, when the two forms of mea-
surement are in the same formula, we naturally tend to think in terms of the money
spent. Is this simply a result of the fact that our society thinks in terms of money as
the universal measuring stick? Perhaps not.
P
RODUCTION OVER
T
IME
Even when dealing with issues of production, for example, the amount of time
seems to get reduced to the role of denominator in the ratio. For example, we may
think of how many widgets we can produce in a fixed amount of time. Chuck can
churn out six widgets
per hour,
whereas Ralph can only produce five
per hour
(Figure 7.10). It would seem that Chuck is more of a widget-meister than is Ralph.
It is perfectly viable to think the other way around, of course. We could have said
that it takes Chuck 10 minutes to produce a single widget, but it takes Ralph 12 to
do so. The math works out the same, but it seems strangely uncomfortable. We feel
almost drawn to do the mental flip-flop to convert it once again to “widgets per
hour.� Why is that?
FIGURE 7.10
Depending on what problem we are trying to solve, production
over time can also be expressed in terms of time per unit of production.
