Name it after: the research behind FinBild's metaphor games

Open any of the four FinBild games and look for money. You will not find it. Liquid Gold is about water at a backyard party. Invest in Earth is about biomass on a dying planet. Before It Melts is a block of ice in a kitchen. The Safe Spread is eggs in baskets on a table that shakes. The words "inflation", "investment" and "diversification" only appear at the end, on a screen we call the metaphor map.

That is a deliberate design decision, and it is the one people ask about most. This post explains where it comes from and what we are, and are not, claiming for it.

The problem we started from

Financial literacy is low almost everywhere it is measured. Lusardi and Mitchell's "Big Three" questions on compound interest, inflation and risk diversification have been asked in many countries, and in most of them a large share of adults cannot answer all three correctly. The diversification question tends to be the hardest: it is the one respondents most often answer with "do not know".

Those three questions are not obscure. Each one describes a cause and effect that a person meets every year of their life. The difficulty is that money hides the cause. Cash in a drawer does not visibly shrink when prices rise. A portfolio does not show you the basket that would have fallen. People are asked to reason about a relationship they have never seen happen.

We already think in metaphors

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argued in 1980 that metaphor is not decoration in language. It is how people reason about abstract things at all: we talk about time as space ("the week ahead"), quantity as height ("prices went up"), and argument as combat. Abstract thinking borrows the structure of physical experience.

If that is true, the useful question for a designer is not whether to use a metaphor but which one, and how carefully.

The cause has to survive the trip

Dedre Gentner's structure-mapping theory (1983) gives the test. An analogy helps when it carries over the relations between things, not their surface features. "Money is like water" is useless if the water only looks like money. It is useful if what happens to the water mirrors what happens to money: left idle, it evaporates, the way idle cash loses purchasing power; frozen, it comes back as more, the way invested capital compounds.

So every FinBild mechanic has to pass one rule before it ships: the in-game cause must behave like the financial cause.

When a mechanic fails the rule, it goes, however good it looks. A metaphor that drops the cause teaches the wrong model, and a wrong model is harder to fix than no model.

Why the name comes last

The order is the part people find counterintuitive. Most courses define the term first and then show examples. FinBild does the opposite: scene, choice, consequence, and only then the name.

Three lines of research point the same way.

Experience prepares people to learn from telling. Schwartz and Bransford (1998) showed that a lecture works better after students have first analysed contrasting cases themselves. The explanation has something to attach to. They called it "a time for telling", and the point is that the time is not at the start.

Struggling first can pay off later. Kapur's work on productive failure (2008) found that students who first wrestled with complex, ill-structured problems, and mostly failed in the moment, later outperformed peers who had worked on well-structured ones. The early struggle surfaces what the learner does not yet understand.

Pulling an idea back out strengthens it. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that taking a test on material improved long-term retention more than restudying it. The metaphor map works partly as retrieval: the player has to connect "Freezer" back to what they did, and then attach the word "investment" to it.

None of these studies tested financial games, and we do not claim they prove FinBild works. They are the reason the order is designed the way it is.

What we can show, and what we cannot

One FinBild game has measured results so far: The Safe Spread, with 55 post-play surveys from 9 September 2026. Every player chose a diversified allocation and named spreading as the way to reduce risk, and 54 of 55 mapped the baskets to diversifying. I wrote up that playtest, including its limits, in What 55 players told us about The Safe Spread.

The other three games have not been evaluated yet. Until they have, the claim for them is a design claim grounded in published research, not an outcome claim. If a number is not from a paper or from our own playtest, it does not go on the site.

You can play The Safe Spread and Invest in Earth in your browser, and the Research-to-Experience Studio applies the same rule to findings from other fields.

References