Endogenous Value

The Endogenous Value in a game is a rather major element that's incorporated into a video game's core design. The Endogenous Value can be applied to a game's economy, with the various in-game coins and collectable goodies you find throughout your journey which serve a purpose as the player progresses. As posted by (Sala b, 2011), it essentially a term that refers to items which have their own value inside the game, but are usually meaningless outside of it. Adding value to in-game items and objects can help keep the player invested, as it give the game more of a purpose and play to keep them coming back. Likewise the Endogenous Value of a game can directly correlate with the game's target audience, as the demographic that plays a game will want to have features that appeal to them (and in this case, having a currency in your game that can be spent on new gear for your character, that's realistically designed to appeal to young men).

An Endogenous Value can also be applied to other areas of a game, for example it can be used for game balancing and adjusting a game's difficulty curve as it progresses. Since the player can level up, earn experience points, get better items, etc depending on the game, their character is naturally going to get stronger over time with a larger skillset at their disposal, and also be much more capable at the end of a game compared to when they first started. That's why a good application of Endogenous Value, like in the Legend of Zelda series, is key to keeping the player invested. As the gradual improvement and accumulation of collectables of abilities means in Zelda future enemies and bosses can also get tougher alongside you throughout your journey to accommodate for your new-found powers, and to also just keep it from getting either too boring or frustrating to play. Since a really easy game with every enemy instantly dying after a hit would be far too easy, likewise if you never got stronger the challenging baddies would just be too much to handle. That's why the Endogenous Value goes hand-in-hand with both the Layered Rewards System and Flow Channels as previously talked about, since they're all pieces that fit together to function in order to make a game good with its various complex systems.

To end, here's a quote to summarise the definition of an Endogenous Value:
"Endogenous is a biology term meaning "caused by factors inside the system". Applied to game design, this means that things that have value in the game only have value in the game. For example, monopoly money has no value outside of the monopoly game" (Lemon, 2011)