Rewrite Needed:: Your Money Is No Good Here

The trope is written as if it were specific to video games, and only found in such games, yet half the examples are from sources outside of video games.

Concurred. This is a plot-point often enough outside of videogames that I think the trope description should change to reflect that. Alternately, we could make a seperate trope page for non-game examples.

I don't think a "non-game version" is necessary, since its the same trope, "Characters in a location where the money they are used to using cannot be used", regardless of if its in a game or not.

^ Then you are simply saying that it isn't a videogame trope in the first place, but one which can occur across all media.

It does have some pretty significant gameplay implications. As a gameplay mechanic, it's used as a justification for why a player can't (for example) walk into a new area, buy what he needs from the shop, and leave. Look at some of the examples:

• Final Fantasy VII has its Golden Saucer area, where normal gil doesn't work, and you need not one, but two kinds of additional cash — GP from finishing minigames (or by buying them from an NPC who is rarely present), and BP, which you get for battling in a Monster Arena.
• Final Fantasy XII has the city of Archades, where gil does work for the things you normally do with gil, but getting to different parts of the city requires a totally different, non-monetary currency called Chops, which you can only get by doing good deeds in a sidequest.
• Pokemon Red and Blue had this in the Slots minigame, where you could only get certain Pokémon by turning in a large number of tokens — which could be purchased at a ridiculous price (50 coins for 1000 yen), or won at slot machines. The tradition continued in the later games in the series, although you couldn't get Pokémon from them.
• The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons has Subrosia, which uses ore rather than rupees. Fortunately, ore can be acquired in most of the same ways rupees can.
• Runescape:
  • The inhabitants of the underground city of Tzhaar only accept a special kind of obsidian currency (made from their dead) instead of the normal Gold pieces used everywhere else.
  • Similarly, Tai Bwo Wannai Village uses currency made of some unidentified vegetable material.
  • Mos Le'Harmless (a pirate island) uses pieces of eight, and Port Phasmatys (inhabited by ghosts) uses ectotokens (pieces of paper smeared with ectoplasm).
• In Super Mario RPG, the currency Tadpole Pond's Frog Coin Emporium and a certain scholarly frog (as compared to everyone else) is Frog Coins, which can be used to buy some useful stat-boosting items. The catch: You can only get Frog Coins by (a) finding them in hidden or hard-to-reach boxes or (b) playing certain minigames, most notably Midas River, where you swim and barrel-jump down a river, collecting coins; only coins you collect can be exchanged, and the exchange rate is usually 60-80 coins = 1 Frog Coin. And each time you play the minigame, it costs 30 coins in and of itself!

In videogames, Your Money Is No Good Here allows the game to go tell the player to raise money and guarantee that they'll actually have to spend time raising money as opposed to using the GP they already ground out of Money Spiders earlier on. Additionally, it allows the game to place restrictions on where and how you can earn the money. You can only get it by playing minigames, or by doing sidequests, etc. I feel like there are concrete, tropable implications here that we don't see outside of a game context.

edited 10th May '11 10:29:08 AM by troacctid

Which is obviously why it has so many non Video Game examples.

Except that the non-video game examples by and large aren't really the trope at all. They don't involve any elements of the trope. They have almost nothing in common with the video game examples. Most of them don't even have anything in common with each other. I'd honestly axe about 90% of them for not being this trope.

For example the Escape From LA one is trying to trick someone that they should give your all their money. The Hitchhikers Guide example is offering something he knows is worthless so he doesn't have to pay as a loop hole. They aren't this trope.

True, there is some misuse, but the overwhelming majority are examples of "a character finds his money is no good." This isn't rocket science, guys. The trope is written specific to video games, it applies much more widely, and should be rewritten to reflect that.

I don't see why so many people are objecting.

No, this trope as written is largely videogame specific (I won't rule out the possibility of non videogame examples). Most, if not all, of the current non-videogame examples are a different trope entirely, presumably due to the title of the trope being something of a Stock Phrase.

So what we need to do is not rewrite this trope, but to create the trope the Non-videogame examples think that the current trope is.

Right, take this one for example:

• In Stephen King's*
  ^{under the Pen Name of Richard Bachman}
  The Running Man, old money is worthless and abundant, and the only way for poor people to acquire new money is by appearing on game shows, which sometimes involve selling your organs or escaping from trained killers.

That's wrong because there has to be a main currency that is accepted in most places, but not in this one place, which uses a different currency. In this example, the main currency is just totally worthless. No good.

• Snow Crash: Neal Stephenson's world used several currencies. Most of them were exchangeable, with the exception of Federal Reserve Notes, used pretty much exclusively by employees of the almost-defunct US Government, and considered effectively worthless by everyone else.

Again, a similar problem. If there isn't a standard currency to deviate from, this trope can't apply.

Yeah, a lot of the general examples are just "Money is worthless in general" not "The money you happen to have on you worthless, but only in this one place even though it works everywhere else." Only the latter is the trope. I don't see any non-videogame examples that fit the trope definition.

Not even The Phantom Menace? I think that's as good an example as there is outside video games.

There are exceptions to every rule. That would be a good non-video game example. It just needs to be made clear that this requires a Global Currency and a place where it doesn't work. Perfectly valid for Star Wars, not so much a lot of the others.

Then it needs a rename, and the more general trope page needs rewritten under this name.

Uh, not sure where the rename comes in. Probably just YKTTW'ing the split trope separately is gonna be fine, I think.

Because the name is better applied to the general "can't spend your money" trope that the specific "game mechanic is artificially jobbing you" trope.

Okay, since this is the oldest thread in this sub-fora...

We need to rename and decided whether to split or redefine.

And what do we do with the Real Life section?

edited 13th Oct '11 3:17:04 PM by chihuahua0

agree

Real Life section? Give it the standard operating procedure.

If we split, do we need two new trope names? Your Money Is No Good Here is a Stock Phrase, but since it's already the name of a trope, does that mean it gets grandfathered in ... even if it's probably going to be the name of a different trope?

edited 2nd Nov '11 4:25:30 PM by DaibhidC

I think splitting is the way to go here. And on further reflection, I could support a rename as well.

Incidentally, existing Stock Phrases do get grandfathered as far as not-being-an-automatic-rename, but they are a strike against the name. And I'm thinking in this case, it may be causing confusion.

Sorry for being late to this thread, but there is now a page action crowner for this trope here. Feel free to add options as you see fit.

I tried to include suggestions other tropers made in this discussion, but if I missed any of them or misinterpreted them, feel free to edit the crowner to fix those mistakes.

If we do decide on a split, I imagine that the name for the video game trope could be decided here with another crowner while the general trope's name would be settled in YKTTW.

edited 13th Jan '12 5:22:24 PM by LouieW

The saying "Your Money's No Good Here" in real life has a different meaning.

The archaic meaning is "we don't want you here, get out".

The current meaning is "your food/drink is on the house, i.e. free".

However, this trope means "please find another type of currency". So it strikes me that this is not a good name: it's an existing term that doesn't mean what the trope does.

Crowner affixed to the thread.

I do think that the just redefine option is a bad one. That effectively gets rid of the video game trope entirely as it doesn't fit with the more general trope. It's getting rid of one valid trope in favour of another unrelated trope.