DinoPark Tycoon and Sim City were games I loved as a child. Learned so much from them. Like saving money on a chain link fence is fine but a T-Rex can escape nullifying your savings...
Transport Tycoon was my first one and then RollerCoasterTycoon second game where I learned how to use small business loan to build prosperous business . pretty awesome games
Man, the late 90s, early 2000s had a golden era of business simulation games. Roller Coaster, Lemonade, and Zoo tycoons, as well as Sim City (you run it like a business, with an iron fist).
I grew up playing Age of Empire 2 and I always made sure to first send workers to the gold mines and build guard towers to protect the assets. Haven't played that game in years but I've substituted digital gold to stocks and towers with strong financial habits.
Lol maybe also logistics management. Placing work buildings closest to the job sites to increase efficiency. Knowing the optimum amount of villagers per work site to not make too many redundant vills. Diversification of assets (all resources) before major purchases (age up) so youre not in trouble with nothing in hand to use during the crucial process. Focus on economy (resource prodiction) rather than vice (unneccessary upgrades or over the top unit purchases when cheaper ones would suffice).
I played Age of Empires 2 a bunch growing up as well! And yeah that and other games definitely helped me learn good financial principles. Also if you still have interest in AoE2 it's had a mad renaissance in the past couple years via AoE2 Definitive Edition. Would recommend.
I was going to comment this but you literally beat me to it, this is a fact! As a 7 year old 20 years ago, working on sharks to get a Santa hat for 24mill and then holding till it was 140 mill, taught my stocks, thanks GE
I still the board game approach better; people get to blind-sided to the glitz of computer games to get the real (and important) lesson. Then, again, that's just me. I am glad I had opportunities to learn about money management via my readings and during the course of my career! It is sad, that this is not taught in school, but glad to see educators finally coming around to this essential task! 😉
I don’t count myself as a millionaire in the game, but I am at that point where I can. My problem is that I like to have lots of the same fish in my storage. I have about 50 red snappers in my storage and that’s not normal.
Thanks for mentioning the problems with buying skins in games, and how exploitive Roblox is. I definitely learned economic principles from games like Roller Coaster Tycoon and even the item economy in Diablo II. They may not be as popular, but you could have also included more board games in the discussion. Reiner Knizia is a well-known game designer who uses his background in math to design some incredible numbers & economy games. Ra, Tigris & Euphrates, Lost Cities, etc. all are fantastic.
I haven't thought about payday in a minute. It was a favorite at our house. One of the last memories I have of one of my grandmas is playing payday with her and her playfully insisting that she could put a card back in the 'mail' card pile and draw another one if it was a bill card, because she didn't want bills 😆
I tried the Nova financial lab games and got the maximum score on every game on the first try. I’m a regular financial expert! It’s basically Daniel Kahneman’s seminal book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, but in game form.
I'm a business teacher without a curriculum and as much as I like to bash on this channel, this video just made me a quality lesson plan for easy. Thank you so much.
Oh wow haven't thought about Rollercoaster Tycoon since I was a kid! What a callback. Also the channel Extra Credits did a great two part series on hyperinflation in MMO games that's worth checking out.
Fire Emblem taught me to spend all my money before the end of the game. At the end of the day, even the money you're saving for the 'endgame'/retirement is meant to be spent eventually, you just need to choose your purchases wisely and strike a happy balance. So many RPG players fall into a 'hoarding' based mindset instead, but it's better to use your potions/elixirs when you need them than try to hold onto them forever, past the point where they're no longer as useful. Then again it's also a game that 'wants' you to beat it and will give you enough resources to do so even if you screw up, and that's not as much of a guarantee IRL.
I heard 'Roblox' and immediately dashed to the comment section to shout out the People Make Games video in case you didn't know to mention Roblox's unethical business practices. Super sketchy stuff there!
As with many things, games are tools that can be used to teach good or bad lessons about money. It definitely feels like there needs to be some kind of control / cap on how much people are allowed to spend on the gambling-esque parts of games.
Theres a game called Suzerain, were u are the ruller of a small country, completly change the way i see government budget and politics, Civilization IV is also a really good game.
Thank you for this video! I teach financial literacy and I appreciate the reminder to use games! I'll check out those Nova Financial Lab games. I may even share this video with the class. Thank you!
Stimulation Games are such underused educational resources- they teach lessons beyond what the game is centered on, most notably finances but other lessons too. Tycoon(Rollercoaster tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, Planet Zoo) games are centered on management, but they also teach creativity, engineering, ecology, and more! even a game like Oregon Trail can teach money management and more
Financial literacy might help people learn to manage their money, but that is not the issue plaguing the masses. The issue is that most people don't have enough money left over after cost of living to establish a decent savings account, let alone invest.
That's a false narrative people use to cover up financial illiteracy. Most people claim they don't have any money, so the problem can't be their financial choices, and that seems plausible - right up until you see them get more money.
@@epbrown01 I grew up in poverty surrounded by other impoverished people and take care of poor patients daily. Your statement is false, disrespectful of the struggle of millions of Americans and quite frankly mean natured.
@@kpatelv607 I grew up in poverty as well, and what I didn't see growing up was a lot of financial literacy. In fact, financial *illiteracy* tends to cross generations since we get early habits from our poor parents. One of my most vivid memories was visiting a cousin's house to see his new baby; he lived in a dirt floor shack... with a 60" tv screen.
@@epbrown01 so he had a 60" TV so what? Tvs cost much less in comparison to the amount of capital required to be free to be saved up to not want for money. That doesn't mean that people are not paid enough to allow for them to meet all their needs, their shelter, their healthcare, their education, then have enough to save for retirement and all have left over to enjoy life with friends and family. Plus your example sounds like it's at least 10 or more years in the past and cost of living has skyrocketed compared to back then and wages have barely gone up since the 70s, not to mention the increase in inflation from then until now. Even those who are working class have to put a large amount of the money they have left over after bills away to use decades later because our system does not believe in taking care of the elderly, so when people are young they aren't allowed the freedom to use their left over funds to enjoy life if they also want to eat food or have healthcare when they're old. Work work work now so you can use your money when you're old, tired and half of the people you wanted to enjoy life with are already dead. But yea, not but a TV is going to fix all that, sure.
My first priority in Monopoly was to buy up Mediterranean and Baltic Avenue, then immediately build Hotels. That way I'd get a cut of anyone else's $200 at GO.
I miss Lemonade Tycoon. I played that as a 20-something. So many hours trying to figure out whether it was worth it to rent out a stall at the baseball stadium or the mall 😊
Another game worth considering is ECO. It is an Economy/ecology simulator in the Minecraft style. You play collaboratively to achieve an objective, but in the process you establish your own currency (and mint it with some resources) and trade. Furthermore, you can establish a government and use politics to manage the economy, even implement taxes and distribution laws. The game is designed to be an educational tool, but is also very in-depth and can give you a fundamental understanding of the role of money.
For me, farming simulator is the craziest one. Take loans, re-pay them, how the prices vary, how you manage the fields (some are for the surface are cheap but may take more time to harvest)... It pays off to have the assets, but liquidity is also a key factor, so a big loan for a tractor could go very bad: if you have to sell storaged resources at a low price, you'll drive the prices down and you'll earn less and less, whereas that if you have liquidity, you can keep the grain for longer and potentially earn more.
I'm one of the ones that likes monopoly more than any other board games. Played with 3 of my friends on a video games version of it. I refuse to trade; they traded with each other. I beat them 4 times in a row. Now they don't play monopoly with me anymore.
I highly recommend the board game Power Grid to teach people concepts like market, offer and demand, opportunity costs, scarcity, variable/fixed costs and margins (marginal revenue or costs). It's also great fun to play!
I absolutely love Monopoly. I have 5 monopoly sets in my home. I used to love Payday. Haven't played it in awhile. I have used the game Cashflow for Kids to teach my kids and foster children about money. They hated getting liabilities. lol
I'm not even 40 but when I heard my 9 year old son says he's 'grinding', I laughed. 😂 I was thinking, how does he grind when he's just playing video games. 😂
Ya, it blows my mind how there are people out there that pay money to do repetitive, boring tasks. Builds up tolerance to do it when theyre older, i guess
I can't remember where online it was but I think it was called hot shot business. You could price goods and services but only had so many stations so you had to staff based on what was trending rather than exactly what you wanted because if everyone wanted a dog gym instead of nail clipping you would lose out if you had the wrong station. It also let you make business decisions like ads to run, smear campaigns to address or if you were going to get a loan to start the business
By the way, and I think J & P alluded to this, there are many better tabletop games than Monopoly and Life today! Resource management, risk management, and opportunity cost lessons can be found in many of them too, even if they're not strictly American Dream-themed.
0:25 How is that a good thing? 0:54 ...which is something Jaspreet Singh is eager to do something about with his RU-vid channel titled The Minority Mindset. 6:02 Fortunately, I could still understand her.
The biggest thing you can learn about money from games is that sky-high costs of them leads to pirating. I don't do it, but I know plenty of people who do.
my sister play roblox and one game on there is basically real life. They have go to work to earn money to renovate their house. They also have to pay electricity bills and when they don't like something they can sell it for less than what they bought it for
Hear me out, FTL teaches financial literacy. You only have so much scrap you can get for a game and you can't buy everything and you need to keep an emergency fund for fuel and repairs, and balance upgrading to get to the end vs upgrades to beat the final boss.
I remember getting a free computer game from school that acted as a life simulator for finances. I loved it, and played several “lifetimes” in the game. I wish I remember the name of it so I can share it with others.
Loz Majora's Mask, Every animal crossing game and Harvest Moon or Story of Seasons and Tales of Games taught me financial literacy also my parents and grandparents and this channel and another.
What's stopping union's from exploiting worker's. Taking what they can out your salary from company itself and destroying the company and reducing corporate competition over workers .
I think insaniquarium also teaches us about money. Keeping cash available when the seamonsters are about to come is important just in case we lose many of our fish we can still buy more fish to generate money after the monsters aren't there. It teaches about having an emergency fund and also choosing which sea creatures (investments) generate most money or have lower risk.
I'm not sure where else to put this but the game was so much fun!!! Thank you so much for brining it to my attention. :D Whoever worked on the background music I love you.
These games are great but the 3rd game exponential growth is experiencing a glitch where instead of playing like it did the first time (you slowly unlock the non college debts and go through them) it starts you with all the debts. This would be fine if it acted like this is what i did but i keep getting rid of all the debts and it says i am experiencing the bias when i dont think about my debts growing as well as my investments but by then i already got rid of them and so i cant play it sadly
As far as I know. Most of these financial games has universal basic income. So I cannot say they totally teach people about Financial Literacy in real world.
Wow, was shocked to see Norway on top given how many people here that are stupid with money and how many that takes out more and more unsecured loans and get into credit card debts. Also a bit shocked number 14th on the list have 2/3 young adults not understanding simple financial functions.