As generic proverbial wisdom has taught everyone in the West, “The best things in life are free.” This statement is of course as useless as it is ludicrously idiotic: the implication is that the best things in life are beyond the purchase of money, but to say something is free implies a lack of cost, and anyone who’s not a great fool knows that there are more kinds of cost than numbers attached to a dollar sign. Things like love, loyalty, wisdom, intelligence, strength, determination, character and happiness can’t be bought with money, but they still carry a heavy cost in effort and in time. And time of course is perhaps the only real currency any of us have, even the currency we receive as a wage is essentially a representation of what people are willing to give us for our time performing a particular job. A doctor makes more money, as does a CEO or a lawyer, because their time is worth more than a warehouse worker or a janitor, but no matter what the ultimate currency of all human interaction ends up being time.
This fact, our limited time on this planet before our eventual and inevitable death (the only event in our lives of which we can be sure) is the source of my problem with most nominally free games.
Most free games, or at least a very large number of them, utilize a currency system. Some of these, like Spartacus: Legends and Dust 514 have a dual currency system, with one currency that is unlocked in prodigious (but meaningless) numbers, massive amounts of which are required to purchase anything meaningful in the game, while another currency which can only be purchased with real money is expressed in generally smaller numbers and is used to much greater effect. Another similar strategy is utilized by games like Temple Run, Zombie Gunship, and the iOS version of Injustice, in which there is only one currency, but it is accrued with all the alarming speed of honey flowing down a slight slope on a freezing winter day, unless you’re willing to spend real money to speed up the process.
Ultimately, these games, while of no direct or prerequisite monetary cost to the player, cost a great deal. Time, after all, is literally the only resource of which we cannot acquire any more than we have: whatever amount we have is the ultimate and final amount that we will ever have, and a game that requires you to spend either real money or untold hours to accomplish anything in the game is far from free. The option to spend either one or both of the two most precious resources available to the human race does not make a game any more free than calling things like love and respect free removes their cost in time, money, effort and emotional investment.
Games like these that demand a time cost much deeper and more meaningful than dollars and cents need to drop the pretense that they’re free.
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