Money can’t buy friends, but it can get you a better class of enemy.
Spike Milligan

Disclaimer: I am not a moneyologist, or dollarary specialist of any kind, though I do enjoy making up words. So, grain of salt.

Money, especially what we commonly call money these days, is a funny thing.

Ok, I’m going to be up front about this. For the previous nine entries, I had a pretty good idea going into the writing where I was going to end up, I had a picture in my head of the final product, more or less.

Today, I’m really winging it. Money is fascinating, and I’ve got some crazy ideas about money that seem to me to be a rich vein for investigation, but will this end up as a game design, or even a game mechanic? I declare that it will!

Sometime last year* NPR aired an interesting report on the Chilean UF (Unidad de Fomento). You might want to read the first five paragraphs of that link, or put up with my brutal paraphrasing: The Chileans have suffered from several rounds of hyper-inflation, and in self-defense, created the UF. The UF is essentially a meta-Peso, adjusted for inflation. What this means is, if you agree to rent me an apartment for 100 UF a month, at the first of each month, I check the Peso/UF conversion rate, and give you some number of Peso equal to 100 UF, the agreed fair market price of the apartment rental.

So, money is weird, and only getting weirder. The UF sparked a great "what if" session at the Wednesday night game (which truth be told, has frequently been less about the game and more about the banter). It might have died there, but this fun article by Bruce Sterling (pun intended?) sparked the memory, and now you get a blogful of it, you poor saps.

Once we left the gold standard, where a federal reserve bill was redeemable for a fixed amount of actual gold, of which there was a finite amount, money has been getting ever more virtual. In a world where most of the money is ones and zeros (a more comforting thought than it existing as an almost infinitesimal series of aberration in the magnetic polarity of a film of magnetic media a few millionths of an inch thick), even fiat paper money starts feeling pretty real.

So I say, in the realm of game mechanics, let’s embrace the virtual nature of currency, and get funky. The low hanging fruit for implementation would be as currency in an MMO, or any multiplayer scheme that uses money.

So imagine money exists only as digital credit chits, and there are many variety of chits, each with their own special function. For them to be effective, the readouts must be visible to the player at all times. These are all ways for the folks running the game to tune in-game behavior. Release the flavor of money needed to achieve the desired behavioral goal.

Slow Money

The digital readout on the slow money chit climbs slowly upward as you hold it. You pump these into the economy when you want to encourage hoarding/saving.

Fast Money

The digital readout steadily declines as you hold it. Encourages churn; smoke ‘em while you got ‘em.

Time Bomb Money

This money is stable for a set period, then self-destructs, taking other money with it. Loans take this form.

Categorical Money

Similar to military scrip or gift certificates, categorical money can only be spent "in-category." If the category is weapons, that chit could only be spent on weapons.

Anchor Money

Like the Chilean UF. Very handy in MMOs, which like Chile have been know to suffer dramatic bouts of inflation.

Geo-Tagged Money

The value of geo-tagged money is 100% at point of issue (or some remote point), and drops off to zero at a certain radius. Encourages the local economy, or encourages migration. This recalls the early colonial banking systems, where local banks issued their own currency, which other may or may not recognize. Personal checks, too.

Lonely Money

This money increases in value the larger your guild.

Loner Money

Money that decreases in value the larger your guild.

Racial/Class Money

Racial in the Dwarves/Elves sense. Class in the Warrior/Mage sense. I can just imagine the links. Chits that are redeemable only by the race/class of player.

Goal Money

Chits that are grayed out until a particular goal is accomplished.

Consumable Money

These aren’t chits, they’re little chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil. But they are also real money. You can eat them, or spend them. Better than fiat money in that they have an intrinsic non-zero value.

Real Money

Gold, Platinum, Mithral. This only works if there is a predetermined, finite amount of the resource in the world, or at least a finite and predictable rate of production. Can be ruined by those pesky dupe bugs. This is where people park their money when they get tired of tracking all their chits.

-game over-

Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.

*As my wife can attest, my time-sense for non-critical issues that exist in "the past" is somewhat hazy. So sometime last year probably means sometime in the past five years, plus or minus.