Thursday, November 5, 2009

The Cost of Art Forms

This is a relative type of general production cost.
  • Poems are cheaper than Pictures
  • Pictures are cheaper than Music
  • Music is cheaper than Movies
  • Movies are cheaper than Games
Hence games are the most expensive art form, unless we consider architecture to be an art from but I don't think architecture belongs here. I kind of tried to fit "website" in this list first, but it isn't an art form, just a technology which carry these other art forms.

Games are the most expensive in this list. There is however a component of the structure that I ignored here which games exploit to reduce the cost per minute of entertainment which is recursion. You can't effectively reduce the cost of a movie by reusing the same scene or the same music. But you can effectively extend the duration of a game by reusing the same rules with only minor variations of the underlying data.