You know, I'm looking at that last post, and my brain is in game designer mode, and I kinda feel like I have to go on a little mini-rant here about how people who "seek wealth" are super frustrating because either they fundamentally misunderstand the mechanics of the game or they are actively trolling, because if our whole economic setup were a strategy game, "wealth" would be a straight up failure state.
Money, in and of itself, has no intrinsic value. If this were a game, there would be no metaphorical sense in trading your bank balance at the end for some number of victory points or anything. Your bank balance is literally just a number. It does nothing to make you happier, healthier, safer, just kind of an abstract.
All the things that DO improve your life are like, things, and services, and homes, and friends, and art, and so on. Functionally, what money does in a game mechanics way is just transfer that stuff around.
It's also important to realize that like, money is not a production resource. There's no space on the board where you convert dollars into cars. You can turn steel into cars, and you can trade money at various places for steel or cars or various other things, but, it stays money. There's just kind of this fixed number of money tokens in the game, they get scooted all over the board to transfer all the important stuff.
In terms of what designers actually tend to model, how money functions is more like when you have a game where there's a finite number of like, wagons, or shuttles, or galleons or something, and there's this whole strategy layer where you have to optimize what's being shipped on them to maximize actual production and point generation and such.
And that actually is how money works, right? Like, I have a closet full of copies of the Missile Command board game. Having one copy of that is worth some points to me, because I can play this fun board game, the rest have no value. There's other stuff I don't have that would be worth points. But I can't just directly trade board games for like, new pairs of shoes (they look at you pretty weird for that). Instead I need money in the mix, which just darts back and forth. Money shifts a board game to the shoe store owner, then shifts shoes over to me, then shifts other shoes somewhere else, and keeps moving all over the board transferring these surplus resources that people need to score points.
And then you've got some capitalist scumbag who just kind of ignores the rules where everyone's trying to hit a minimum count on stuff they need/want to max their scores out and instead just goes "let's see how many of these money tokens I can get sitting on the same space on the board." And like, OK, you can do things like that in games. People do weird challenge run crap all the time. But... you're just kinda locking the whole board up so there's no legal moves that can be made. Nothing can get traded because all trades need a money token on one side, and they're all over there, where you refuse to send them out. You aren't getting any points from having them there either, and honestly, if you weren't just being an asshole and trolling the whole game, you could let one money token out for like a single lap around the board, let everyone make SOME trade, and trade back for it, letting everyone profit, even you, AND you'd still get to have the weird arbitrary money hoard after that circuit completed.
But instead you're just sitting there with a smug trolly grin watching everyone get increasingly frustrated as they all say "pass" every turn with a dead game state and silently agree to never invite you over to board game night again because turns out you're either a total asshole or at the very least someone who is incapable of either understanding the rules or reading the room and getting that you're maybe doing something wrong and that's why everyone is so pissed off at you.
And I mean, that whole metaphor isn't even getting into how life isn't even a competitive game. You only get to play the one time, and it's all about just having the highest score you can manage to have, not placement on a leader board, and other people having higher scores leads to more sources of points being created that you can then access, so the real smart move if you don't actually see anything you need to trade for is to just fling those money tokens over to someone who doesn't have surplus resources to let them start producing something too.
