Money and banking in online games

Anyone who’s ever played a roleplaying game for any amount of time will tell you stories about their money. Maybe it’s how they had to grind 500 sewer rats to pay for their new wooden sword, or maybe they were up for 9 days solid in some obscure part of the world where “no one’s ever been” collecting a rare harvested material to price gouge in the marketplace to fund that new mount. Whatever the details are, it becomes very obvious that people treat their in-game money just as defensively (or even more defensively for the younger age groups who don’t have as much experience with earned “real”-life currency) as they treat the money they earn in their real jobs. Many players don’t even realize that they’re actively contributing to an economy that lives, breaths, and behaves just as one would expect under “real”-world conditions; they just want that new piece of gear, or to repair the gear that they’ve been fighting in for the last 12 hours solid.

Virtual money, just like the currencies used to fund nations in the “real” world, can be explained using extremely rudimentary economic concepts. The models of markets, of supply and demand shocks, of counterfeiters and others can all be used with some accuracy to predict (with varying accuracy) fluctuations in the economic conditions of a game world. However, there are several things which are markedly missing from today’s role-playing environments that any real, sustainable, thriving economy should have, and this does much to undermine the day-to-day reality of the game itself.

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