What financial literacy products can learn from Neopets
Risk diversification. Inflation. Numeracy. Compound interest.
If your users understand at least three of these four concepts, they’re one of a remarkably few people—just 33% of the global population—who experts consider “financially literate.”
Why should banks care about financial literacy rates? Because financial literacy helps banks comply with regulatory requirements, enhances reputation and trust, and contributes to overall economic growth.
By creating a financial product that embraces gamification, you can help your users take steps to improve their financial education and well-being through increased product adoption.
Gaming is the secret sauce for product adoption
A gamified experience needs to be genuinely playful and entertaining to successfully attract users. It can’t come across as an attempt to “force feed” healthy habits or lessons.
Balancing engaging tasks with genuine learning moments is key to:
- Encouraging people to engage willingly.
- Ensuring the experience stays entertaining enough that people continue to come back to it.
Cracking this code isn’t easy. The reality is that any kind of product adoption is challenging, but it’s especially difficult for banks. Let’s face it: the BFSI industry doesn’t exactly have a reputation for being “fun and entertaining.”
As a result, adult-focused gamification and visuals for financial tools are few and far between. Those that exist are often lackluster—but there is one that, while a bit of a dark horse for the title, we’d argue is easily the best game for teaching consumers about finance.
That game is Neopets. For those who don’t remember it, here’s a snapshot of what it looks like:
Lessons from the success of Neopets
Neopets is an online Flash game that peaked in the mid-2000s and is still remembered by millions of Millennial and Gen X users for its educational legacy.
As one article, titled “An ode to Neopets, the game that taught capitalism to kids,” describes:
“The motivation behind the game was to make as many Neopoints as possible, and there was even a Neopian stock market, called the NEODAQ (a nod to the NASDAQ), in which you could buy and sell stocks.
There were actual Neopets too… But really, the fun of Neopets was to hoard currency and become a 13-year-old business mogul.
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The financial wisdom imparted by Neopets may have been a happy accident, but its success speaks for itself. Back in the day, Neopets was consistently ranked as one of the “stickiest” websites, with 14 million users each spending an average of nearly two hours every week playing it.
Even today, Neopets still offers plenty of valuable lessons for designing effective learning experiences through gamification.
1.) Unstructured discovery
The foundation of Neopets was built on the principle of unstructured discovery. A relative lack of tutorials and walkthroughs in the game’s early days meant players learned financial concepts through experimentation and exploration.
While some guidance is always necessary—think basic navigation instructions—fully scripted paths risk turning education into a passive activity. The value of unstructured discovery is how it inspires players to think, try, fail, and learn rather than just follow a “perfect” run-through someone else created.
By minimizing step-by-step cheat sheets or guides in favor of encouraging genuine discovery, educational games created by financial institutions could empower users to learn for themselves and reinforce their long-term understanding of financial concepts.
2.) Linking engagement with outcome
Gamification helps users get on board activities that aren’t traditionally fun: The natural progression of a game acts as an incentive, demonstrating to users how engagement pays off.
In Neopets, progression went hand-in-hand with finances. The more you played the game, the more Neopoints you could earn. And the more Neopoints you earned, the more fun the game became.
With enough Neopoints, for example, you could purchase collectible items like “Paintbrushes,” which were highly coveted but so expensive that only the most experienced Neopets users could afford them.
Hard-won and hard-to-resist digital collectibles like these can provide the incentive users need to engage long-term within a gamified financial experience. Abstract “quests” or satisfying visual milestones clearly showing the customer’s financial progress are also worth considering.
Some financial management tools like Mint and Acorns have already introduced gaming-inspired celebratory visuals to signify achievement when users meet a savings goal, incentivizing them to continue making investments as a way of making their money work harder.
3.) Community
Community can also play a huge role in inspiring a sense of achievement. Part of Neopets’ attraction was the ability to interact (and show off!) within a global community of users.
While that community is comprised mostly of tweens and teens, the appeal of simple social competition like this never goes away. Just think about platforms like Strava, which emphasizes community to inspire competition and engagement among an adult audience.
This principle can easily be carried over to financial platforms and experiences—and even improved upon! By integrating friend challenges or the ability to share visual representations of achievements, you can leverage community to amplify engagement and learning outcomes even further.
Gaming is a key part of the recipe for relevance
Finance and gaming may seem like an unlikely duo, but there’s a massive opportunity at the intersection between them.
By leveraging the principles of gamification, you can transform mundane financial tasks into engaging, interactive experiences that not only educate but also motivate users to take control of their financial futures… Just like Neopets did.
Ultimately, by creating experiences that are not only educational but also genuinely enjoyable, financial institutions could use game design principles to ensure that financial literacy is accessible and appealing to all.