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I was reading Robert Kiyosaki's “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, and as the book was explaining the value of having an understanding of financial statements and accounting, I realized something pretty crazy: playing RollerCoaster Tycoon as a kid somehow indirectly taught me financial literacy.

Originally, I was going to post this as one of my “This Week I Learned” series. And while that realization did happen this past week, I've actually been playing RollerCoaster Tycoon since I was a small child. Perhaps I'm slow, but learning financial literacy through the game was a process, rather than some short, one-week gaming binge. But with that, here's how I learned financial literacy by playing RollerCoaster Tycoon!

Note: I am not in any way recommending Robert Kiyosaki's books or playing RollerCoaster Tycoon for financial education. This is a simple blog post expounding on what I thought was interesting. Please do not take anything I say as advice of any kind.

Brief Game Overview

All screenshots are from RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic on iOS

For those who don't know and haven't played, RollerCoaster Tycoon is a series of video games in which you act like a business tycoon trying to open a theme park, with rollercoasters being the main attraction. The first game in the series, created by Chris Sawyer in 1999, was packed with dozens of missions and scenarios (and even more in its expansions) in which players could build theme parks while trying to meet certain objectives and goals. Its first sequel, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, was released in 2002, and had almost the same exact gameplay and mechanics, with a few tweaks to make it both more streamlined and add a bit more difficulty to the gameplay. Further sequels added a 3D engine and new ways to build and create rollercoasters and other theme park rides, but interestingly, I could never get as attached to those games as I did the first two.

Part of the reason for that was because of the original's (and it's direct sequel's) simplicity. While the transition to 3D allowed something which I always thought I had wanted (the ability to actually ride the rides I created), when I did finally play the 3rd installment, I realized that I didn't actually care that much about virtually riding rollercoasters. Instead, what made me fall in love with the original game was its basic mechanics of business cost and profit management.

Building a Park in RollerCoaster Tycoon

Most of the scenarios in the first two RollerCoaster Tycoon games are pretty straight forward. You're given a set amount of time to meet a goal while making sure you're also keeping your park at a certain rating. For example, in the first scenario, Frontier Forest, you're given one year (game time) to get 250 guests into your park, while maintaining your park rating at 600 (which basically meant guests on average thought your park was pretty decent). Some scenarios already have guests and rides, while others are almost a blank slate.

Frontier Forest, the first scenario

In most scenarios, you began by building some basic rollercoasters and some gentle rides and food stalls. You're also responsible for hiring handymen to keep your park clean and tidy, mechanics to inspect and fix rides, security guards to keep a check on vandalism, and entertainers to bolster the happiness of your guests. You had a research tab that could be used to obtain more and different types of rides. You could even alter the landscape of your park to design some crazy ones.

All of this cost money. In the game, there is an entire window dedicated to helping players see and understand the finances of their park. And that is where my financial education began.

Financial Management in RollerCoaster Tycoon

At the start of most scenarios, you're given a loan to get your park started. However, this loan was given to you at a 10% interest rate. I found out early that most rollercoasters I wanted to build ended up costing almost all of my initial loan. If I built it, I had barely enough for other rides, food stalls, and staff to maintain the park. Then, the costs of ride maintenance, staff fees, stall restock fees, and the loan fees would eat my finances into the negative, preventing me from building out the rest of the park. This wasn't too much of a problem in the initial scenarios, which were so easy you could almost not build anything and still win. However, as the scenarios became more difficult, I would often lose them simply because of an inability to manage my finances.

I then learned to try to keep my debt down. This meant trying to pay off my loan as quickly as possible. Instead of borrowing more money to build my one massive coaster, I would build a few smaller rides to churn in the money. Over time, I would pay the loan off, and then my park's finances would always be 'in the black'. With that, I was able to build the crazier rides I wanted, without worrying about not having enough money, and not meeting the scenarios' objectives on time (I don't like losing).

Then the scenarios got even more difficult. Some, like Dinky Park and Micro Park, were so small it seemed impossible to build anything to get guests in. Others, like Rainbow Valley and Gravity Gardens, had heavy building restrictions which often conflicted annoyingly with the scenario goals. And then, there's scenarios like Amity Airfield, which required an absurd number of guests by a required date.

In these difficult scenarios, it became paramount to keep finances in check. To do so, I had to learn to build exciting rides quickly, so as to get more guests in fast. Then, I had to simplify what I built, often building multiple of the same rides. Then, especially with smaller parks, I had to streamline landscaping and geography so that I could build those same multiple rides quickly and easily, without needing to worry about whether something would fit. And in this way, it was almost like learning to build franchise or chain restaurants, as customized rides gave way to pre-built, pre-tested ones which guaranteed results.

Looks almost like a factory line of coasters

And while this might not sound like “fun”, by the time I was finishing up with the most difficult scenarios, it actually was quite fun to see how far I could push my ability to maintain a rollercoaster theme park.

A Financial Life Lesson

Financial literacy isn't very difficult on a broad scope. The basic premise is to have more money coming in through income and assets than going out through liabilities and expenses. Of course, the details of risk assessment, tax laws, and basic business management are far more complex than this. But it is important to know this as a general rule.

In the game, rides such as rollercoasters can represent assets which bring in money. But they also have a cost—that of building and maintenance—which means they can also be liabilities. If a ride, over time, costs more than the money or income it brings in, it becomes a liability rather than an asset. This is often the case with old rides in the game, which start to deteriorate to the point where almost no one is riding them, and they only incur maintenance fees.

Understanding how to balance ride costs with ride maintenance, stall stock resupplies, research funding, and other expenses taught me to think about what I would be building next in terms of financial risk assessment. If I wanted to create a huge, complex, custom RollerCoaster, I needed to make sure that the funds coming in from the park would be enough for so that I could take the time to design said coaster.

RollerCoaster Tycoon's Financials window

More importantly, I learned that paying down the debt was not always the best. In the more difficult scenarios, I wouldn't have time to try to pay the debt down immediately. Instead, I had to create an income which would supersede the debt, so that in the future I could pay it down. When I did pay it down, I would still sometimes borrow more money, because I knew that my income could take the hit.

Thus, having an income which surpassed what I owed from my loans was more important. And this was what I learned from playing a simple video game since I was a child.

Final Thoughts

Video games can teach us a lot. In fact, during my secondary education, I actually studied the effect of video games and education for one of my research projects. I found that gamifying education had the potential to bring many benefits, even at a the university and graduate degree level, though the process of gamification was in experimentation stages at that point.

Growing up, I've always believed that I learned more while playing video games than in formal education. After all, any gamer would be immediately able to tell you the exact stats and abilities of their RPG characters, and how they would be able to master that character to its optimum, even down to the specific number of times they would need to defeat some boss or enemy in order to accomplish such a goal. That a player would get so involved in the detail of his or her character, and yet be unable to answer fundamental questions about literary or even historical figures they had just learned in class speaks volumes about both the ineffectiveness of formal education in my time, as well as the strength and potentiality of gamified education.

What I find fascinating is that I don't consciously try to think of RollerCoaster Tycoon when I'm budgeting or discussing finances with family and friends. But the lessons I learned from the game were always unconscious influences, nagging my brain to make sure that, with anything I wanted to purchase, I'm always calculating whether it would exceed or come under my income.

Heck, now I want to go play again.