In-Game Money

March 2010 (Updated May 2010)

External rewards (AKA extrinsic motivation) are bad. This has been sufficently explained.

In most games (particularly video games), in-game (virtual) money is an external reward. I hold this truth to be self-evident, although I haven’t seen it stated so explictly elsewhere.

(There are rare exceptions, such as the board game Monopoly. In Monopoly, money isn’t an external reward, it is an intrinsic part of the game. Money in Monopoly is equivalent to hit points in other games.)

This has broad implications for a wide variety of games.

A thought experiment; or, what to do if your game has in-game money:

Set the player’s money supply to infinity.
Get rid of everything that no longer makes sense (e.g. inexpensive but bad upgrades).

Odds are good that the game will suddenly be vastly improved. If the game got worse, it was never good to start with.