Repost: Animal Crossing Exchange Rate
The current issue of Game Informer magazine has a single-page article about finding the real-world value of fictional in-game currency. Where have I seen that before? Oh, right, in 2009, when I did it.
I don’t claim to have come up with the idea first, but I do claim to have done it before that magazine article was written. Because I did.
Here is the entire text of my post from January 21, 2009:
I’ve been playing the stalk market a lot recently.
Turnip stalks, that is, in Animal Crossing: City Folk.
If you’re unfamiliar with the stalk market in Animal Crossing, here’s how it works: every Sunday morning, you have the option of buying turnips from a character named Joan. The prices of these turnips varies week by week, and you can only purchase them in blocks of 10.
Throughout the rest of the week, you can sell your turnips back to the local shop owner, Tom Nook. But here’s the catch: every day, the price he’ll pay you for turnips also varies. It’s a dangerous game to play, because you could end up selling your turnips for less than you purchased them for.
After the week is up, your turnips rot or something and you can’t use them again. There’s also some other thing that has to do with red turnips, but I’ve never done that, because you have to plant them, and all my plants die.
Anyway, a couple weeks ago, I noticed that Nook was lowballing me on these turnip prices. I became angry, and, living in the US, decided I would sue. But I needed to know: How much money am I going to sue for? Animal Crossing doesn’t use US dollars, it uses Bells—and what am I going to do with thousands of bags of real life bells? Therefore, I devised a type of Animal Crossing Exchange Rate, and here’s how I did it:
Step 1. Since you can’t buy real money with bells (yet), the task was to figure out what else you end up spending to earn bells. The answer? Time. So, I found the only source of regular renewable income, selling seashells, and figured that it took about five minutes to harvest all of them from the beach.
Step 2. Next, the average amount of money that I earn by selling all the seashells on the beach hovers around 1,500 bells. This is EXACT SCIENCE, in that I didn’t really do any research other than this.
Step 3. So, 1500 bells = 5 minutes, right? So you agree, then, that an hour of seashells translates to 18000 bells, right? Good.
Step 4. The current Federal wage rate in the United States is $6.55. Therefore, 18000 bells = $6.55.
Step 5. Which means that 18000/$6.55 = 2748.09160305344, or, rounding down, 2748.09.
There you have it, 2748.09 bells to the dollar.
TEN DOLLARS PLEASE, NINTENDO.
Note: minimum wage has gone up to $7.25 since. 2482.76 to the dollar. ALMOT ELEVEN DOLLARS PLEASE, NINTENDO.
