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Up to early this year, I played for a few months the game Tiny Tower on my iPhone. Have reached 100 floors, I considered the game as “finished” and stopped playing. You can look at my tower here with its glorious 100 floors.

Tiny Tower is one of many, many games in the family of “work” games based on FarmVille (there may have been earlier games, but FarmVille was the first gigantic success of its kind). The idea is that you are building things that will produce “money” after a set amount of real-world time, though they may need attention from time to time to be able to produce that money. Building things on its own takes money, and again takes time. There’s a social aspect where you can visit other players' game areas (with limited interactivity though). At last but not least you can buy “special money” that will help speed up production of things and, this time, can be collected only be special means or by buying it using real-life money.

The parallels to real consumer economics are uncanny. The games, especially the free-to-play ones, tend to be stacked against you by making things irritably slow at higher levels, hoping that you would by their “special currency” for real cash. And you want to build things faster either because the work aspect of the game is too tiresome, or because you want to show off lots of stuff you built in the game to your friends. In effect, this is like real life, where work is boring but is done only for the materialistic or social benefits of having money. As such, borrowing lots of money (or stealing it) seems to be an acceptable approach, since our society doesn’t value much restraint, patience or work ethics.

And boy does it work. Those games make tons of cash sucking people in to pay real cash for virtual goods, just because people are impatient and want to show off. A few of those games, like Tiny Tower, are not free, hence have far less a tendency of making the game unbalanced against you. But otherwise, those games feel like working for a bank for whom you borrowed a house too big for what you need, and then years later when you hate your job at the bank you complain when you can’t figure out why your colleagues aren’t interested into forming a union. The entire system is made against savers and for borrowers that are risking their financial future for short-term luxury. It’s a completely rigged system, yet you willingly went in it.

So in the end the question is, before you shell out all that real money for virtual goods: Do you actually enjoy playing the game, or are you doing it only out of social pressure and impatience? Put another way, are you working because you enjoy it, or just to be able to borrow more and eventually only to pay your bills? The fact that so many are suckered into those games is a good indication on hey they act for financial and work matters in real life, and how in the end consumerism and materialism won.