The notion of "in-game currency" is fairly commonplace these days. The psychological tendency to lose track of the value of this currency in relation to "real money" is also known. It turns out to be much more work to translate or convert the value of "gold coins" or "gems" in a game into U.S. Dollars, so we mostly skip that work. This allows game companies to collect more real-world money from players who purchase in-game money with little thought to budgeting. In fact, many contemporary games which advertise themselves as "free-to-play" are relying on this fact. The tendency of a small number of players spending enough money inside the game to make it profitable is hard to imagine to those of us who have so little, but there it is.
Most see nothing odd about using currency now, excepting those who want to "bring back the gold standard". It is an interesting point that real "currency" is a fabrication not based on any real item. It does not represent an ox, a unit of work, or even a gumball. It is a translation or conversion of time spent working into a portable
exchange token that can be redeemed for items that are of actual use. I propose that money is actually analogous to "in-game currency" because it cannot be used outside the system that spawned it. Of course, that system is nearly all-encompassing, and local currencies can be exchanged for travel outside the area. However, one cannot eat money nor use it to fuel a machine, and if one is lost in a wilderness, it serves no purpose until returning to the "game zone". I am not saying there is anything "wrong" with money, only that it is helpful to recognize what money actually is and what it does-both intentionally and unintentionally. One of those effects is that folks do not immediately think of money as a unit of life. If I thought of money as representing the finite resource of my own life, I would approach it quite
differently. It is easier to spend $40 than to ask if it is worth 2+ hours of my life in
order to obtain a shirt. Yet it is the same thing-it takes at least that
long to get the money to buy the item. This reframing of money is not original, as it
can be found from a number of financial advisors. Linking this disconnection of how people spend their lives to the new method of paying for entertainment is the focus of this post.
This is because I think what this demonstrates, in turn, is the tremendously unsettling idea that we don't need to know how something works in order to use it-and have it used against us. That the psychological mechanisms of gambling are only loosely understood, yet they are expertly used by casinos to gather tremendous profits from customers. In this case, we didn't need a model of "video game currency" to understand how divorcing currency from it's origin could make people less cognizant of its value, and spend more freely. As soon as we established that we exchange time working for coins and bills, we became more willing to buy frivolous items because we didn't spend the time making them-we just shelled out some tokens to buy someone else's work. We may discover even greater abuses of psychological tendencies which had been exploited by canny individuals or businesses precisely because the phenomenon was not understood. In the end, Barnum may have known "there's a sucker born every minute," but did he ever state (or understand) the companion: "everybody thinks they are not the sucker, which makes them easier to manipulate"?
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