Let’s face it, everyone wants to be rich. Video game designers capitalize on that want by giving us something to judge our in-game wealth with... Currency.
You’ll have a whole lot more players staying plugged into your game if you give them benefits for doing so. Take Runescape for example, some people have already accomplished everything, but their quest to make tons and tons of money just overwhelm them, and they even spend real money just trying to amass a fortune of virtual cash. Greed does this to people. They see the money as a way to become powerful in a game, and once they amass a bit of it, they just want more and more, which gives the developer almost complete control over the player because their life revolves around acquiring these so-called currencies.
The want for these currencies are so great, there are certain people that even “farm” gold, or money, for real cash. In China there are even full time “gold farmers” that make a sizeable amount of money per month compared to their average income levels, plus they get to play video games for free! In 2005 the NYTimes estimated the virtual cash “industry” had around 100,000 workers in China and this was six years ago, It makes you wonder how many are doing it now that there are even more people playing video games.
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