One of the internal battles I fight while raising my daughter is DLC. I'm teaching her a proper Wahabi interpretation of downloadable content - "paying real money for in-game items is takfir"- and she definitely gets it. At the same time, she'll absolutely sit there for half a day waiting for her dragon egg to hatch or whatever. And the games she plays are the ones with ads for other games that make you wait half a day for your dragon egg to hatch, and she tells me things like "You know what's wrong with Township? You can't do anything without paying real money."

Meanwhile, pretty much every game you've ever heard of has gone free-to-play. The "buy the game and play it" model is totally fucking done in the casual space. I'd buy her a copy of The Sims and she'd be happy, but you don't just buy a copy of The Sims anymore. You download The Sims and EA shoves DLC at you every ten minutes. Her best friend? Plays the shit out of Roblox, because of course she does, because her parents buy her whatever the fuck she wants in Roblox. Did you know you can pay $3k real dollars for a Roblox dress?

So on the one hand I hope she's learning the difference between "currency" and "scrip" where "currency" is that thing that has value everywhere while "scrip" is that thing that has value within a limited system. But on the other hand "money" is basically "mark your chores down in the app and you can save up for a Beanie Baby at JoAnn Fabrics" and you can't buy anything for sticker price at JoAnn, it's all transformed through "how many other things are you buying" "what other things are you buying" "how many coupons do you have on your phone" and "how many coupons is the cashier lady going to use because you're a cute kid." It doesn't help that the game she learned early and loved was "store" in which trinkets temporarily change hands for numbers that are arbitrarily assigned. She has created not one, not two but three token economies in the past eighteen months, cornering the market in pine cones, small rocks and "pirate coins brought to school for the express purpose of making people give me pirate coins in exchange for goods I craft" respectively so I think that kid is gonna have a positively abstracted understanding of money no matter what I do.