I'm sick today, but I'm still blogging dammit.
Other than the whole mortal coil angle, let's take a look at two notable Western open-world games, the GTA series and the Saints Row series. Both use story events and revenue-generating activity to provide the player with a sense of growth. The stat-based character growth that we last saw in GTA San Andreas is seen also in Saints Row 2, but these are rarely the loci of capital management--the heart and soul of these games is the accumulation of wealth, where clothing, cars, real estate, and social capital are merely status symbols indicative of player progress.
First of all, it's interesting that there's no barometer for total net worth. Well, there are stats such as total money earned and total money spent. However, these are hidden in statistics pages and aren't central to the design--which flies in the face of these games' purpose--not to advance a story (though these are important for setting motivations). In Saints Row, there's a style meter, which grows as the protagonist purchases clothing and real estate. This translates to a multiplier buff in a metacurrency, reputation. GTA 4 goes in the opposite direction, where social capital is the most easily measured (your number of friends, and for some reason, the wallpaper on your phone). These divergent designs both work for different reasons, and no doubt contribute to a feature differentiation. Not that I'm complaining (yet).
The meat of the issue is the cost of goods and arguably services. Since I'm currently playing Saints Row 2, I'll pull from these prices:
A jelly donut:
Real Life: $2 at most
In-game: $85.
Real Life: Delicious, probably a thousand or so calories.
In-game: 70% health. Okay, I suppose this is an incredible value.
20rds 9mm Ammo:
Real Life: $5-10 depending on where you shop.
In-game: $100. What.
Real Life: Fun for the whole family.
In-game: Mostly useless. Ridiculous. I'm assuming these are pre-loaded and come with the magazine. Then, we're close to real life.
Plastic surgery:
Real Life: $thousands, risk of death, not covered by insurance
In-game: $500 all-you-can-eat. Instant recovery.
Real Life: Evade law enforcement, look awesome.
In-game: Evade law enforcement, loow awesome. Fine, for the sake of gameplay, we can ignore the recovery time.
Sweet downtown loft:
Real Life: depending on location, $500k-$2M. Then there are the condo fees, taxes, etc.
In-game: $50k. Cash, no financing. For starters, 50k is what I'd pay in real life for a down payment on a property.
Real Life: Shelter, possibly happiness? Tax shelter? Rent it out?
In-game: Right now I have strippers and ninjas hanging out and drinking booze. Oh yeah, I get access to a bottomless garage and a helipad.
Bonus: Hookers from GTA:
Real Life: hm, I'm not familiar with the market but I'm assuming a few hundred for street meat and thousands for an escort service.
In-game: approx $100.
Real Life: Realizing your life is empty
In-game: Nothing really, your car just bounces up and down. There's no STD statistic.
I'm interested in costs from Fable 2. Anyone got numbers?
In any case, we see a drastic inflation of costs for everyday goods and a significant discount for larger capital purchases. If we were to take in-game prices to represent a different currency, a conversion rate would correct your everyday costs-of-living to be about market. However, this makes the big-ticket items even more affordable.
We can attribute these design choices to two factors: player progression and disposable income. Making the switch from couch surfing to renting usually takes a stable income. The transition from rental to ownership is even more drastic, requiring the ability to make a down payment and afford upkeep costs. Ownership usually sets back the purchaser's buying power temporarily--and while this effect is preserved, the player is able to claw his way out of the burden of ownership rather quickly, if he subscribes to story-centric tasks with an exponentially increasing reward size but fixed reward schedule (the player's willingness to fulfill mission objectives). This is the reason for a logarithmically flat cost range: to avoid a financial grind that players are actually trying to escape (oh look, let's call it Financial Escapism).
One interesting design choice from Saints Row 2 is the ability to purchase businesses--which provide a 20% kickback on purchase price. This amounts to a 100% ROI in 5 in-game days. And since there's no inflation or taxes and the returns are fixed, it's an investment scheme that, for me, makes about $13k/day at the moment. This is a minimal-risk investment (the only risk being running out of cash to purchase food and ammo). These merely make story progress harder but not impossible. Protip: start fights on the street to obtain ammo. This assumes you expend less ammo than you collect, so don't suck at shooting, k? Protip: The Fight Club activity provides free food during matches. Throw away those blunts and fill up on burgers being thrown into a sweaty octagon.
Tangent: In racing games, two opposite attempts have been made in this topic. In Need For Speed Underground 2, car purchases were based on vouchers based on sponsorship instead of vehicle costs. This tied your stable size to your story progression and kept us from windowshopping all day. But game developers also understand that we ENJOY the process. Latter NFS games as well as the Midnight Club series use approximate real costs and enjoy success because a) there isn't really a sub-$10k market for new cars, so your entry barrier is much lower and b) story progression demands exponentially increasing reward sizes with a fixed schedule.
Tangent: Let's take another genre, my masochistic favorite, the Armored Core series. In the early game, there's a focus on trading parts and working with a budget to accomplish goals. Sure, it's a spreadsheet simulator of sorts, but difficulty and reward are matched with story progress, along with a logarithmically flat cost range, make progression bearable. Sure, there's a bit of a grind in this series, but it's mostly your fault--using parts that use more expensive ammo, failing to invest in PA-centric parts, resulting in a higher cost in armor repair, picking more expensive wingmen. There's not much grind for financial leeway, moreso the OCD is instigated by the impulse to obtain an S-rank more than the urge to obtain exotic parts.
Bleh, so that's it. We play games with money in them because of Financial Escapism and its more important features are logarithmic cost range and reward scheduling via story progression and risk to disposable income.
This sorta makes me wish This Is Vegas would finally come out so I can economicanalysisnerdraeg about that game too, but I fucking gave up on that title already.
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