Discrete versus Continuous Quantities

What happens when you're hungry and want two thousand of something?

A discrete quantity is most simply described as something that can be counted using the regular counting numbers (1,2,3,4…). You can have 120 Power Stars in Mario 64, but not 116.45 Power Stars. Power Stars are discrete.

A continuous quantity is usually something that isn’t counted, such as the amount of sand you have. Nobody says that they have “4 sand”, although they may say that they have “4 bags of sand”, which would be a discrete number of bags containing a continuous amount of sand.

Confusingly, just because something is easily counted, doesn’t mean we should treat it as a discrete quantity. Imagine grains of rice or dollar bills. Both are easily counted but usually handled in large enough quantities that they may as well be treated as continuous sand.

In Dark Souls, the player gains souls (effectively continuous quantity) and trades those for stat increments (discrete quantity) so that they can increase their DPS and probability of beating the next boss (continuous quantities).

Keep an eye out for those quantities in the wild and see you next time!