FinWorld RPG: A Novel Financial Literacy Education Tool

Abstract

Financial literacy among youth has always prompted new tools for improvement and new methods of learning. As such, this research adopts a product management, user-centered approach to develop a novel financial literacy education tool. Specifically, through an initial user-survey detailing the financial literacy, credit literacy, and content/study preferences of young adults, a novel tool in the form of a Role-Playing Video Game (RPG) emerged. The paper highlights the decisions, development, and evaluation of FinWorld, a RPG that teaches credit and credit card literacy, introduction to investing, and introduction to taxes. Through talking to supporting characters, answering their questions, and shopping around, the game provides an exploratory virtual world for youth to learn new financial literacy topics, developed through the Unity Development Interface and C#. The game guides the main player through six main quests and many more sub-quests in order to learn about each topics and unlock more character interactions as they complete each educational task. Unity provided a convenient, efficient, and user-friendly interface to help visualize and create the game components and interactions in FinWorld through intuitive physics components, interactive interfaces, boolean gate logic for game-play, and game object references among each other. Ultimately, the six-quest game proved to give an increase of content retention by users and also showcased enjoyment from the game aesthetics and overall game-play. Further development with character interactions and world-building would show exceptional promise for youth in their financial literacy journey as such a novel medium could show promise in improving youth financial literacy.