What Video Games Taught Me About Finance

By Becky Ferreira

Action-adventure and RPG games are packed with hidden lessons about real world wealth.

It started, as many adventures have, in the town of Blackwater on the shores of Flat Iron Lake. I walked into the Gunsmith’s shop to check out his wares and saw the most provocative and expensive weapon I had ever come across—an “explosive rifle,” on sale for $10,000. Despite the fact that there were many people depending on me, the reformed Wild West outlaw John Marston, to carry out errands for them, I became obsessed with raising the cash to buy the gun.

You may have caught on that I’m not referring to real places or people, but rather locations and characters in the 2010 Rockstar game Red Dead Redemption. Like many fans of the game, I was completely sucked into Marston’s world, which is why I was surprised by how easily the explosive rifle derailed me from the main storyline.

Ever since that frivolous quest, I’ve frequently found myself chasing virtual big ticket items in games like Skyrim or Horizon Zero Dawn, while holding off on other more pressing missions.

The result has been some weird lessons about money garnered from video games that are intended to be dazzling narratives, not financial primers. Because most immersive games mimic the real world to some extent, they weave in at least some rudimentary economic principles—a bank account, means of income, and products that can give you an edge when achieving your goals.

These systems are an important functional feature of the playing experience, but they also spotlighted some of my own financial strengths and weaknesses, and reinforced basic principles about real world finance. Here’s some examples of ways in which the bank accounts and wish lists of my game characters got me thinking about my money habits in real life.

Credit Impacts Pricing

Like most action-adventure games, it’s fairly easy to rustle up some cash in Red Dead Redemption, so my Marston took off to bag outlaws for the bounties, gamble, collect valuable herbs, and hunt game to sell in general stores.

When I eventually circled back to the Blackwater Gunsmith to collect my rifle, my Marston had also done a bunch of good deeds, apparently enough to accumulate the positive “honor” to be ranked a Peacemaker in the game (this status reflects how noble Marston has been in past social interactions; if you play as a scoundrel, you get different rewards). This cut store prices by 50%, and suddenly the explosive rifle was only valued at $5,000. Marston’s good behavioral track record had become a kind of permanent discount card.

In the real world, we have a similar system—credit scores—though it is correlated with the ability to consistently pay debts. That metric is not necessarily related to honorable actions in this day and age, yet does evoke however, an old-world honor when debts were a sign of weak will and questionable morals, and we hadn’t yet created a system that saddles people with an average of almost $40,000 of debt by their early twenties. But the point is the same: Consistency, whether it’s good deeds or paying bills, enables prices to fluctuate in your own favor.

When I played this game back in 2010, I was already aware that it’s a good idea to work on your credit score, but I hadn’t put much effort into it. Marston, wise rogue that he is, was part of the reason I got more invested in building better credit by prioritizing paying off debts and working to have low utilization ratios on my cards. I hope Red Dead Redemption 2, which is due out this October, will have other weird finance lessons in store for me.

Mo Money, Mo Problems

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https://www.vice.com/en/article/pam8pv/what-video-games-taught-me-about-finance-good-habits