Like many words in today's society, defining education is difficult to say the least. This is because of the huge disparity of what one person would consider education. School is a word that is much more synonymous with the majority of the population. But are these two things the same?

Often, people say that you receive an education in school. But with new ideas, people are now seeing education and school as separate, or at least each having their own defining character. In the modern era, the idea of education includes everything you learn through your daily life. This means that you are able to get an education outside of an official institution such as a university.

With this, I believe it is interesting to see the adaptation of education in today's progressive era.

Learning comes in all forms and despite the older folk saying that video games are rotting our brains, I believe that video games can be a stimulating way to teach children complex topics in a way that will keep those dopamine levels high.

My Game of Choice: Maplestory

I learned this first hand. I was able to learn many of the basic business tactics without even knowing it at the bright age of 5.

For those who are also video game enthusiasts, you may have heard of the game Maplestory. It is a game by Nexon that is a 2-D side-scrolling massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). There is a virtual currency in the game called Mesos that allows you to purchase better equipment to make your character stronger. And this is where it begins.

How I Learned Business Principles

Buy Low, Sell High

In the game, you could get mesos by killing monsters that would drop them. However, this would be the equivalent of trying to find pennies on the ground. It wouldn't be profitable. The other and the better alternative would be to do the most basic principle, buy low, and sell high. This is the most basic business principle to produce a profit, which is defined as revenue minus costs.

Even as a five-year-old kid, I was able to notice that there was a low, average, and high cost for various items. One of these items for those versed in Maplestory was Ilbis, a throwing star for one of the character classes that allowed you to do more damage. However, this item is not a high tier nor a low tier item giving it a unique position where many higher-tiered players were trying to get rid of them (buying low from these people) and mid-tier players who sought them out (selling high to these people).

Scarcity

Economics works on this one principle: scarcity. Scarcity is the idea that there is a limited amount of goods within a market. In this case, there was a limited amount of Ilbis in the market since they were not a farm-able item. While I didn't know the economic term at the time, it was basic understanding to me that when there is less stock, price increases drastically since the demand for the product was higher. This is exactly what happened with the market for Ilbis, and of course, I took advantage of it.

Convenience

By understanding my customer, I was able to create convenience for my customers in the game. Thus, I was able to sell at a premium price level. I did this by offering to travel in-game to the consumer rather than forcing them to come to me. Fixing a problem like this is a key principle when trying to run a business. Take granola bars for example. Granola bars are extremely cheap to manufacture, but they provide a quick and easy snack for the consumer, and thus, consumers are willing to pay premium prices for what is a relatively inexpensive item.

Advertising and Marketing

To sell products, you need to advertise. In Maplestory, you would go to the Free Market (FM), an area where people would congregate to sell their items. I use to sit for hours copy and pasting the same line "Selling Ilbis 20 million mesos!" While this wasn't the most efficient option to sell the products, it was effective, to say the least. Staying in the FM for long periods of time allowed me to hit a larger number of consumers which allowed me to convert them into buying customers.

Automation

Nexon, the company that created Maplestory, has to make money somehow. The video game market is driven by pure profit. Since Maplestory was a free-to-play game, they instead offered in-game purchases that would ease the gameplay slightly. One of the most useful products they sold was a virtual character store. This store would allow you to leave your character in-game with your computer running that lets you list items for sale in the Free Market. This store basically allowed you to remove yourself from the copy and pasting. So instead of sitting there for hours on end trying to sell my products, I would just leave my character there to do the work for me! This would be like purchasing capital in the real world. A machine that does a monotonous task will save you time and money as it did for me in Maplestory.

Even better than this was a virtual shop. Nexon sold a store that allowed you to leave it there WITHOUT having to leave your character there as well. So this would be similar to hiring an employee to run your store. With this method, you could actually play the game by being able to sell things at the same time. Of course, this came at an added price. It cost nearly double the amount in real-world money when compared to the character run store.

Competition and Location

With these stores, there were better spots to leave them with higher amounts of player traffic, but again, these spots were scarce. I was able to learn the importance of location. Location is one of the key aspects when planning out a business. It could make the difference between success and failure. Being downtown in most cities is extremely expensive, but it comes at a benefit that there is a huge amount of foot-traffic that would pass by and allow you to advertise to the larger number of consumers that could be converted into customers.

What Does This All Mean?

What I am getting at, is that all experiences could be education if you are able to turn it into one. I fell upon this idea accidentally through Maplestory, but I am obviously not the only unique case. Many game developers are seeing the value in game-based education with a multitude of mobile applications that have come out recently to give an incentive to children for learning.

In the modern era, school is not the only future. With the internet rising at hand, entrepreneurship is at an all-time high, and getting a college-level learning experience is in the palm of our hands.

Live intentionally.