I would categorize myself as fiscally responsible. I’m pretty conscious about the way I spend my money and I often find myself questioning whether I need to buy something new. I don’t eat out very much. I don’t buy a lot of food or drink for pleasure. I do a pretty bad job of updating my wardrobe or even replacing clothes that fall apart. I’m definitely not the tightest spender I know, or even in my immediate family, but I would say I do a decent job. I think I got a lot of my tendencies from my parents, but I know that I’ve learned a lot about money from video games.

I’ve been playing video games since I was basically a toddler and a lot of the games I’ve played over the years have had some kind of currency built in. I think my first real memory of game currency was The Legend of Zelda: A Link the Past on Super Nintendo. Rupees, while not incredibly important to the game, were a currency that I ended up farming. StarCraft taught me that currency is something to think about strategically. Diablo 2 taught me to bank up currency and wait for the right sockets. Warcraft 3 taught me about upkeep, and that there’s a cost to having a lot of stuff. There’s a trend here with Blizzard games, and it continues with the one that taught me the most. World of Warcraft taught me that it’s easy to waste money, and that understanding something’s true value goes a long way.

For those of you who don’t know about World of Warcraft’s in-game economy here is a (not so) quick breakdown. The game has a pretty simple currency. There’s copper, silver, and gold. One-hundred copper is equal to a silver, and one-hundred silver is equal to a gold. As you play the game you get currency from picking it up off of things you’ve killed, selling items you pick up off of things you kill, selling things you collect using professions i.e. flowers that you’ve picked, ore that you’ve mined, selling things you’ve created using professions i.e. leather armor, potions, or enchanting other people’s armor or weapons, and sometimes you get paid for completing a quest. There are lots of ways to acquire gold, but there are also lots of ways to spend gold. The game has built in gold sinks. As you level up, in order to learn new abilities you have to pay your class trainer to learn them. The prices for new skills increase as you level. If your gear takes damage you have to pay to have it repaired. Once you reach level 40 you can buy a mount to ride around on at a faster speed. This is the first big gold sink in the game at 100 gold (80 if you have a higher reputation and a PvP rank), and often players don’t have the gold to buy their mount once they get to level 40. It takes some extra time and effort to get that gold. You also have to pay if you ever want to change your talent tree and specialize in something else. The cost of this increases each time you do it, and caps at 50 gold. This may not seem like much, but if you’re having to change your talent tree regularly it adds up. The largest purchase between players and a vendor in the game is for your mount at level 60. Once you reach level 60, which is the max level, you have unlocked the ability to purchase what is referred to as an “epic mount”. These mounts are even faster than the ones you can purchase at level 40, and they’re the fastest way players can move around in the game. Epic mounts cost up to 1,000 gold (down to 800 gold with higher reputation and the right PvP rank). To put that into perspective, most people end up getting their level 40 mount (~100 gold) somewhere between level 40 and 45. By the time players make it to level 60 they probably have around 100-200 gold saved up. That means they have to find a way to make up to 900 additional gold in order to purchase their epic mount. Often times there are other things that players end up needing to purchase during that grind to 1,000 gold, so it can take some players weeks or even months.

Those are just the costs built into the game. The real factor that makes World of Warcraft a great fiscal responsibility teacher is the player economy. The most important aspect of the player economy is the in-game auction house. The game has a built in auction house where players can place anything on the auction house and set an opening bid price and a buyout price of their choosing. While almost everything in the game can be sold to vendors, often times you can make more money by selling it on the auction house to other players for a markup from what the vendors pay. This means that the economy within the game is determined by the players. Every item’s worth is determined by how much someone is willing to pay for it. The other thing that having an auction house does is that it allows players to search for anything they could want or need. As a 13 or 14 year-old you can probably see why this played an influential role in teaching me about money.

I’ll start with knowledge of the game. When I was paying WoW for the first time I was 13 years old. At the time, not very many people had a full grasp of the game, and I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was doing. This lead me to make poor decisions daily when it came to my gold. I would level, or work on professions, or do something else productive in the game, and then go and cruise the auction house. I would look for things that I thought were better than what I had. Sometimes they were better, and sadly, sometimes they weren’t. I was one of those players that saw something rare and assumed it was better than what I had. This is not the case, and actually more often than not, the rare items you find on the auction house aren’t even meant for your particular class. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand that. I spent all my gold buying things that weren’t good for me and I was constantly poor. I’m talking less than 10 gold at any given time poor. This presents a problem when there are important things in the game, like mounts, that cost upwards of 1,000 gold. I wish I could say that as I played I learned about saving and being careful with my money, but that’s not true. I was lucky to have friends in the game that were responsible with their money, and after watching me ride around on my level 40 mount for months they gave me the mountain of gold necessary for me to purchase my epic mount. Shout out to Polaris and Leisia. You guys made a dumb teenager very happy.

Over (a long) time I did learn. When the first WoW expansion came out players were able to level up to 70, and with that came two more mounts. These were flying mounts. The first one cost about the same as the epic mount, so around 900 gold. The second one, the “epic flying mount”, cost players up to 5,200 gold. This was a massive jump in gold-sinks within the game and it’s where I finally took to heart the lessons from all of my wasted gold. I played everyday and put hours and hours into accumulating the gold necessary for my epic flying mount. After what felt like forever, I finally bought it with my own gold. That’s one of my greatest personal accomplishments in the game and having that positive experience of saving up and spending my money on something worthwhile has stuck with me.

To this day, I still remember some of the dumb purchases I made back when I was 13 or 14. I’ll be looking at stuff online, or in a store, and I’ll think about whether I actually need it. Is this a good purchase, or is it me buying two rare axes that literally don’t do anything for my character other than the fact that they are rare axes.

I know that my parent’s habits and what I’ve learned in school have taught me about fiscal responsibility, but I also want to give credit to the experience of working to gain currency and then throwing it all away on stuff I don’t need. Learning how easy it is to throw away money has been incredibly impactful. I was fortunate to be able to learn that lesson playing a video game where the currency was all in-game and it didn’t affect my state in life. When I think about all of the positive ways that video games have changed my life this is one of the biggest. I wish this was something that I felt confident in prescribing to parents, but with the current state of video games I don’t anymore.

Video games these days have made a giant shift towards including in-game purchases that can’t even be bought with in-game currency. It’s gone so far that there are games out there where you can pay additional real money in order to gain an advantage in the game. Kids don’t understand that. Teenagers don’t even understand that. Unless they’re spending their own real dollar on those purchases they aren’t learning the same lessons that I did. If they are spending their own real money they’re learning those lessons at a much higher cost than I ever did.

The issue with in-game purchases using real money for loot boxes, cosmetics, or whatever is bigger than I’m ready to provide an answer for. I’d love to say “get rid of all of it” and be done, but I don’t think I have that kind of pull. The shift towards including in-game purchases has made it difficult for today’s young gamers to safely learn the lessons that I learned. It’s not impossible, there are still lots of games out there that provide safe ways to learn that spending money on crap doesn’t do much for you in the long run. My hope is that in-game purchases run their course and we get back to video games making players work for the stuff they want, and put obstacles in their way that teach them the value of saving up and thinking hard about their expenditures. To all the video game companies out there: make young gamers waste their hard earned gold so that later on in life they don’t waste their hard earned money. If you do, parents might read this blog and be more likely to purchase your game. At the least, you’ll teach some young people valuable lessons about fiscal responsibility.