I’ve been thinking about it for several moments, and this doesn’t really make any sense. Yes, the second game would not be any fun. Doom wouldn’t be any fun if you installed a hack that let you kill everyone on the level with a single keypress. That doesn’t mean that the point of Doom is not to kill as many monsters as possible.
Yes, the money in video games is really an abstract measurement of in-game achievement, has no intrinsic value, and could easily be swapped out for even more abstract “points,” or golden rings, or bananas. The “ultimate goal” in all games is to have fun, but that observation is so broadly meta that it’s trivial. The OP is pretty clearly asking why, in the fiction established by the game, money is so rarely the ultimate goal.
Anyway, getting back to the OP. The big problem with money as the primary motivator for a lot of games is that it makes it really hard to justify the protagonist’s actions. Gunning down hundreds of Nazis to prevent them from completing their giant death ray is heroic. Gunning down hundreds of security guards so you can steal a giant pile of money is abhorrently evil.
Certainly, there are plenty of games out there where “abhorrent evil” isn’t a problem for the protagonist (GTA and its horde of imitators come immediately to mind), but that pretty sharply limits your story telling opportunities. If you don’t want to do a crime game, you need to come up with a justification for the action that doesn’t make the protagonist into a monster, and that rules out a lot of purely selfish motives.
A lot of sandbox games let you spend money on non-essentials like new clothes, or apartment upgrades. Things that don’t offer an in-game benefit, other than looking cooler than what you get by default.
Seriously? That’s got to be about the third most common theme in popular music, right behind “I love you,” and “Why don’t you love me?”
This has pretty much already been answered though; It’s the same reason not many people’s goals in real life are “make a billion dollars.” No one CARES if you have a billion dollars. They care if you have a house on the beach, in the mountains, and in downtown manhattan, six cars, eat at fancy restaurants every day, and wear armani suits.
Money isn’t a goal, money is a means. Even in games that ARE about getting money, there’s always a reason the protagonist wants that money. Maybe they’re in debt. Maybe they just want a grand retirement (Sid Meyer’s PIRATES! is the one that always comes to mind as a game about a person wanting to acquire personal moneys, and it works really well, but even then, the money itself isn’t really the goal, the goal is to live happily and wealthily when you retire from piracy.).
Maybe you’re ACTUALLY asking why there isn’t a game about someone striving to make money to “live the good life”. I dunno. Too much like people’s RL goals?
I agree with Thudlow that a binary win/lose is the main reason. It can work with a mercenary character if the game’s a single job with no opportunity to cash out before the end (Shadowrun Returns does this, although the payout’s only one of a number of possible motivation hooks the game provides), otherwise it seems fairly arbitrary (these vast sums of money I’m acquiring and re-investing in cars and guns are not enough for me to retire on and quit risking my life, this specific amount I get at the end of the game is)
This is what I was thinking. I worry about making money in my real life. I don’t want to do that when I’m trying to relax.
When you do have money, it’s more fun to spend hard-earned gold on +5 Adamantite Plate Mail Armor of Ogre Strength than to spend my emergency cash on a new dishwasher.
Ever notice it’s easier to make money in video games than in real life?
A) I’m not asking anything. It’s not my OP, and I don’t agree with its premise.
B) The Sims.
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Ever notice it’s easier to make money in games than it is in real life?
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I don’t know about that. My modest middle class income may not compare to what you get for the bank heist mission in GTA IV, but I didn’t have to die fifteen times to get it, either.
There’s Recettear but I never finished it so I don’t know if money ends up being the end goal in the end or if you get to save your dad or something. At the start it’s all about money, though. And if you fail your loan payments, the GAME OVER picture shows you living in a cardboard box.
There’s also Donkey Kong, where the goal is to get your Bananas, the fact that you have to defeat K. Rool to do this is just incidental.
Kirby also tends to have the plot “somebody took your cake, you liked that cake. Go get your cake back.” The fact that you tend to eventually end up fighting Nyalarthotep’s kid is mostly a fluke.
I disagree that it doesn’t often happen, just not as often as real life.
I don’t think money is what the OP was driving at, more the greed angle rather than the saving the X/being a hero angle.
The answer of course is that many games do use the greed angle, to a greater or lesser extent, many already mentioned in this thread.
An example would be the Tropico series - the ‘mission’ goals tend to be improve things for the people of your island, but the metric that gets carried over from mission to mission throughout the campaign is how much money you managed to embezzle to your swiss bank account.
Any number of buisness management simulations follow a get more money ethic - I can see the argument about you only want more money to expand your company - but you could argue the only reason to expand the company is to get more money. Objectives are often just tests of how quickly you can get money.
Finally, I know its already mentioned but recettear is pretty explicit. Its catchphrase is even “Capitalism, Ho!”
That is flat wrong. Neither Recette nor tear actually cares about getting lots of money. It’s just that Recette needs it to keep her house (as her flaky father ran off to chase insane schemes). If Recette has a positive motivation, it’s to make friends; if tear has one, it’s because she has an older-sister-ish view of Recette.
