Monopoly and Gold Farming

Last time I gave an introduction to inflation. Today I am going to expand on that theme using the classic game Monopoly and gold farming.

Many of you remember playing the game Monopoly. You run around a board purchasing properties, trying to get all the properties of a certain color.

There are some alternative rules of Monopoly. One of them is that when a player declares bankruptcy, all the properties that player owns is placed up for auction. If one has participated in one of these auctions later on in the game, the going price for each property is substantially higher than its initial selling value. Why does this occur? Too much money chasing too few goods. The amount of money introduced in the game goes up $200 per person per trip past GO! The amount of land never increases.

In the game of Monopoly, this relativistic inflation is the same for everybody. In other situations, it is not and that can bring trouble, such as in the case of gold-farming.

Classically defined, gold-farming is where one obtains virtual currency in an online game and exchanges said virtual currency for real world cash. This is against the terms of service in all online games; because this encourages people to hire other people to play the game cheaply, or create 'bots' that will play the game and gather the loot which will then be sold.

This is bad because it encourages people who have the cash to purchase virtual currency, and thus, purchase elite items instead of playing the game and obtaining the items either as quest rewards, random drops or trading with other players. In first person shooter games, if one spends $10 on a more accurate and powerful weapon, this will be an advantage over equally skilled players who are unable to, or chooses not to, spend $10 on said weapon. Many people have ranted over this practice.

In Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, this gold-farming disincentives the casual player from either taking up the game or to continue playing the game. This is not good for the casual players and over time, is not good for the game as a whole as fewer and fewer people play the game.

Next time I will conclude this lesson on inflation by discussing inflation on a national level.