Entries Tagged 'Games' ↓

I spent quite a few of my formative years in Honolulu, Hawaii and only moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I started high school. The middle school project that I remember most clearly was named “The Cost of Living in Paradise”. The Hawaiian Islands is often addressed as paradise, but the cost of living on these islands is very high and so our sixth grade English teacher wanted us to learn about the financial burdens our parents go through. The project worked like the following:

1. We all picked an educational degree out of a hat
2. We all picked a marital status out of a hat
3. We all drew the number of children we had randomly
4. “Married” people were paired up with partners.
5. We had to look in the newspaper classifieds for jobs according to our educational degree. (This was 12 years ago and online job ads were not very common)
6. We had to find housing in the newspaper. (no craigslist yet!)
7. Then based on the pay rate of our “jobs” we set up a budget and calculated how much money we have left at the end of the month.
8. Finally we had to create a poster with all the classfied ads we found and present our budget, and tell the whole class what the cost of living in paradise is.

This is how my fate in paradise turned out. I had a high school diploma and I found a job as a carpet shampooer paying $2000 a month. I was married, and my “husband” happened to be my best friend, who had an associates degree in the culinary arts so he found a job as a chef paying $37,000 a year. It was pretty funny because he was a chubby boy and the whole class laughed and said they could see him as a chef (in reality he is in law school now). Fortunately, we had no kids. The few details I remember about our budget is that our rent was $700 a month, and we had one car and I took the bus to work because public transit is very abundant on the island. We also only budgeted $20 a month for entertainment. In the end we had about $760 left in savings every month.

It sounds so childish when I write about it now, but I remember being very proud of that project because we had the most savings out of the entire class even though we weren’t graded on our savings amount. Some kids budgeted $400 a month for entertainment and $600 a month for clothes and ended up with 0 dollars for savings, and some of the “single” kids said it wasn’t fair that they had less money. Some of the presentations were quite funny,too. For example, a boy explained that he needed to use a lot of money for entertainment to buy the things his parents didn’t buy for him. The takeaway from that project was 1) stay in school to get better paying jobs 2) budgeting lets you see how much you can spend 3) Hawaii is expensive. I don’t think the lesson got through to everyone, but it was still a worthwhile exercise. It is probably the only personal finance lesson I actually had in school, and that’s why I remember it so well. Now that I am really married and working I think I am a little less frugal than my 12 year old self, but I still manage to save a lot with the hubby. On a side note, I sincerely hope the spendthrift kids in my class aren’t living in the zero savings budget they drew when they were 12. Anyway, I think this project can be replicated anywhere with any literate kid and a few newspapers. Of course, it is a lot more fun with more kids in a classroom.

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It’s 2 am, and my hubby is playing Halo 3. He actually made me order three copies to make sure that he got one. One copy is for him and the other two copies are for his friends. Yup, I definitely contributed to the record breaking $170 million Halo 3 raked in for the first day. Video games are entertainment items that we always purchase because the hubby feels like he has to support his industry, and he also enjoys having a collection of games that he can play at anytime. The video game industry have come a long way and is now quite mainstream. Some may say that it’s unfair that the media is comparing Halo 3’s revenues with the revenues of a book or movie because inherently games are more expensive than books and movies. However, I feel that most good games have more entertainment value per dollar than other forms of media, and I will list a few reasons here:

1. Cost Per Hour of Entertainment – Most new video games cost from $30 to $60 and take a fairly long time to play through once. I have had games that I played for 100+ hours and so the cost breakdown is only 30 to 60 cents per hour. On the other hand a movie DVD costs anywhere from $5 to $20 to buy and only takes a couple hours to watch. Movie tickets are even worse because you can only see the movie once for $6 to $12. We could also compare games to musical media. Each compilation CD is about 60 to 70 minutes and sells for $5 to $20, and that works out to be much more than 60 cents per hour. Unless you’re a media pirate and get all your movies and music for free, then games are cheaper for the amount of entertainment you could receive.

2. Replay Value — Okay, not all games have a good replay value, but many games do. I find that I tend to replay games more than I re-watch movies or re-read books. Some games are designed so that they can be played over and over again. For example, Brain Age on the Nintendo DS is designed so that you play it everyday. Some games such as Animal Crossing or the Sims are designed so that they don’t really end so that you can spend many many hours discovering new things in them. Music does have a lot of replay value and you can easily listen to a song hundreds of times, but music does not change and you will still be listening to the same song after 30 hours. However, you can play a game in different ways and make different choices when you go through it again. Additionally, in some games your skills improve as you play it more so it becomes even more fun.

3. Social Form of Entertainment — Movies and books are not very social forms of entertainment. Generally you watch a movie or read a book and do not talk to your friends until after it is finished. The social element of going out to movies is more in the gathering involving food and drinks either before or after the movie. The dine and wine part costs even more money than just the movie ticket. With the networking of all the new gaming platforms games have become much more social than before. With an internet connection, friends could adventure together in games like Guild Wars, or battle against each other in Team Fortress 2. When people bring together their consoles or computers to play they also have a bonding experience that tends to be stronger than just sitting around watching a movie.

4. Interactive Entertainment — Compared to other forms of media, games are the most interactive form of entertainment. You could yell all you want at a person in a movie to do something but they probably won’t obey you at all. In a game you can direct a character to climb walls, plant trees, or dance around. The possibilities are endless. It’s quite easy to fall asleep during passive entertainment such as movies because they do not require any input, but unless a game is extremely bad or you’re overly exhausted then it’s quite difficult to pass out during a game.

5. Some Games Could Save Your Money or Make You Money – Games are certainly expensive, but one good game can occupy all of a person’s time. Before the hubby and I started dating he was playing World of Warcraft. Since he only played that game, he didn’t buy any other games and any other form of entertainment. He paid the subscription fee which was under $20 a month. Then he quit cold turkey because he said he wanted to play other games, and the monthly entertainment expenditures went up quite a bit. There are many games that people play full time, and some of these people make their livings playing and selling virtual items. Second Life is a prime example of a game that promotes real money trade. The game has a real exchange rate between the US dollar and the virtual currency called the Linden and players of Second Life have created a multitude of virtual shops and products within the game. The issue of real money trade in games is fairly controversial because many gamers think that it ruins the gaming experience. Many games are now filled with “gold farmers” that only play for money. The point is that people do make money from just playing. It’s probably not healthy to be addicted to one game, but it really cuts down on the entertainment spending.

In my opinion, video games definitely gives you more entertainment bang for the buck. I admit that I am a little biased because my hubby is a gamer and a game developer, but I buy games because I think they’re worth my money. The hubby and many others like him put a lot of effort into crafting hours of fun for the masses. Game developers are often underpaid and I agree with the hubby that we should support them by buying games.

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So tonight on the way home I heard about a game called “Financial Football”. The plug is this: “Visa and the National Football League have teamed up to help students across the country learn financial concepts — with Financial Football. Students tackle financial questions like professionals in this fast-paced, quiz-style game divides classrooms into two teams that compete by answering finance-themed questions to earn yardage and score touchdowns.” When I heard this I thought, wow, what a horrible idea for a game. What kind of kids would play a game called Financial Football? Additionally, it seems like a game that’s geared towards boys since most girls I know aren’t really into football. It was really funny because the news report ended with a man saying, “many people in the NFL are on their way to leaving their careers penniless because they do not know how to manage their money, and we’re hoping that this game will teach kids about finances.” Anyway, curiosity got the best of me and I looked up the game online. Apparently I could play it online.

The game starts off with choosing your teams. I picked the Patriots and the Raiders. Then the “Kickoff” starts and a series of finance related trivia questions are thrown at you. You only have ten seconds to answer each, and some of them were not very easy to answer in ten seconds. For example, one question asked how much interest would you receive if you had $100 and it compounded yearly for 2 years at 10% a year. I got the correct answer of $21, but it’s not super easy to answer in 10 seconds. Some of the questions are so long that it’s hard to read it all in the strict time limit. I was surprised that the questions covered a very wide range of topics including insurance, mortgages, interest rates, credit cards, and simple economics. It even had a question about the rule of 72. However, this is my favorite question out of the entire game:

When do you get the social security money taken from your paychecks back?

A. 10 years

B. At the end of the year.

C. When you retire

D. Never

At first I picked C and the game said that was wrong, and then I picked D, and that was the correct answer. I’m glad to see that Visa is being brutally honest with the children of America.

I didn’t agree with some of the questions and answers in the game. For example, one question asked which investment was the riskiest and listed corporate bonds, corporate stocks, and money markets. Their correct answer was corporate stocks, but actually I think some junk corporate bonds are much worse. Besides that, I think this is a good game for parents to play against their children even thought I am not very fond of the football elements throughout the game. It also contains too much trivial information such as whose face is on which coin. The radio newsclip said that teachers are using Financial Football to teach middle school students, and I’m not sure a lot of these fast paced question and answer sessions will stick. Hopefully some of the good things in this game will be absorbed into the young minds of the future. Anyway, if you’re bored, try your hand at some Financial Football and tell me what you think.

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This week central banks around the world injected billions of dollars into their financial systems to ease the credit crunch. Stories like this really makes me feel like I am living in a virtual world. In any MMORPG, the administrators have the power to create as much money as they want and “inject” the assets into the world. They can also create items and put them into the world. The items then get traded by players. This is practically what happened here in the real world. Many homes were created on the basis of non-existent money, and then the non-existent returns got sold all around the world. When the world realized that all of these assets are essentially virtual, the powers that be created more fictitious currency and lent it out to its minions to balance out the economy. Since our currency system is decoupled from the gold standard, there is no real world item that ties to our money. Essentially our money is as digital and virtual as the money in a game. In games there are designers and QA engineers that work on the balance of the economy and sometimes they do catastrophic things to the worlds to make the gameplay more interesting. There are also times when the original design is flawed, and balance needs to be brought to the world through patches. So what are the central banks doing exactly in our world by lending out more money? I think they’re trying to restore balance, but are they ultimately fixing the bugs in the system or just applying a workaround? Real life is the ultimate MMORPG with 6 billion players world wide, but who are the ones pulling the strings?

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