Ramblings of a Gamer

As with every Christmas season, there are a whole lot of games out there to buy right now. All the more so now that I own 2 systems I did not own last Christmas. Games can be very expensive, especially now that I own a PS3. For a few years now my money has mostly been spent on Nintendo DS games, which are fairly cheap, and World of Warcraft game time. Now looking at building a library for PS3 and PSP, the potential cost is somewhat daunting. I’ve never had all the games I want. Just the other day I filled out the “My Games” and “Wishlist” lists on my Playstation Network account, and the wishlist was bigger than the games list. So how do you decide what to buy when you can’t get them all? Some people will go about it different ways, but this got me thinking. How do you actually measure a game’s worth? Logically the best investment would be the game that gives you the most enjoyment for your dollars, but how do you measure that value?

First off, I want to point out that it’s pretty much impossible to measure a game’s value before you buy it. Sometimes you will know that a particular game is supposed to be short/long, but you can’t know how much time you will actually play the game or how much you will like it beforehand. That said, thinking about a game’s “value” is not particularly productive if you already own it, so this is mostly just a topic that was interesting to contemplate.

With that said, the first thing I personally thought about when approaching this was money spent versus time played.Using Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions as an example, I bought the game for about $30 Canadian, andplayed it for roughly 85 hours. That comes out to 2.83 hours per dollar spent, a pretty good number. In this case, the game was a lot of fun and it was cheap, and so the system works fairly well. There are so many other things to think about though. What if the game wasn’t so good? What about the fact that it’s portable? Do you gain points because you can take it anywhere and stop/start at will? Do you lose points because the battery can run out? What about the main game? Do you gain points if its the same as the console game? How do the gameplay tweaks rate? What about the new content? Multiplayer? What if you bought the game used, or got it as a gift? If you think about it at all, measuring cost vs. playtime really isn’t very accurate. If you look at a game like Portal, it is very short, but very good. Look at an MMO like World of Warcraft, and you have almost infinite potential playtime, but you probably aren’t going to enjoy all of it. If you wanted to you could even consider things like flash games, or straight up downloads. Do they rate way higher than a game you pay for ever could, just because they are free? There’s more to it than that, for sure.

To be honest, I don’t think its possible to make a system that can produce a numerical value that will be accurate in all situations. Sometimes you ask yourself if buying a certain game was worth it and you don’t even have to think about it and you know the answer. Even trying to assign a value to a game probably falls into the category of way over thinking, but hey thats what I do. The best I can think of, involves assigning a game a rating out of 10. This in itself is something I don’t particularly care for, and hence you will never see me assign a rating when I review a game. For the sake of the topic at hand though, let’s go with it. Rate the game out of 10, then divide your rating by 10. For example, say I gave Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions a 9/10, this would give me a 0.9, a 4/10 would be 0.4 and so on. Now multiply your decimal value by your time played, in the case of FFT:WotL, 0.9 x 85 = 76.5. Now take that number, and divide by how much you spent on the game. Again, 76.5/30 = 2.55.

With this system you account for the game’s cost, how much you enjoyed it, and how long you played. This leaves a lot of the variables I mentioned above, as well as many that I’m sure I didn’t even think of, unanswered, however the primary ones are addressed. By multiplying your rating by your time spent, you somewhat account for the game’s quality and quantity. That isn’t to say that just because a short game that is really good is better than a long game thats just ok, but the long game probably gets you more bang for the buck. Likewise if a game drags or is flat out bad, that should reflect in your rating of the game, meaning it would have to be real long and real cheap to match a good game in value.

Just for the heck of it, here are some games based on this system. Keep in mind, most of the costs and playtimes are estimated.

Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War – (0.9 x 85) /30 = 2.55

Legaia 2: Dual Saga - (0.75 x 40)/90 = 0.33

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness - (0.8 x 120)/20 = 4.8

Evergrace - (0.4 x 8)/10 = 0.32

Portal – (0.9 x 4)/20 = 0.18

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time – (0.75 x 160)/70 = 1.71

Shadow of the Colossus – (0.9 x 12)/15 = 0.72

World of Warcraft - (0.85 x 7200) /700 = 8.74

Gemcraft chapter 0 – (0.85 x 30)/0 = 25.5 (actually error, but calculators are dumb)

So as you can see by looking at this list, a very flawed system. It’s fun to think about though!