Welcome, members of the Avocado new and old, to Monday’s Weekly Video Games Thread.

Our prompt today concerns currency – at least, entirely fictional, in game currency. If you’d like to discuss the often abusive economic practice of using fictional currency that’s only a stand-in for real-world currency, that’s fine, too, but I’d like to talk about systems of money used within the universes of the games we play. Hyrulean Rupees (as opposed to actual rupees) or “Pokédollers” or Blood Echoes, thinks like that. It could even be historical money presented in unique ways, or systems that throw that out entirely in favor of barter or some such.

Consider the bottle caps in Fallout. They’re money, and a more sensible kind for this universe than other kinds, but they’re also world-building. You literally get to go to the Sunset Sarsaparilla Factory in New Vegas as part of a cool heist mission. The bottle caps are so much more iconic and memorable than the oodles of nondescript gold coins you see in so many games, right? It adds to the game in ways beyond the mechanical.

But that’s just the prompt. How has the weekend treated your playing?