[1][2]: 24 The first such toy money was printed in 1880 by the Milton Bradley Toys company, and was actually a teaching tool, distributed to schools so that children could play at commercial transactions and learn skills for reckoning change, recognizing coins, and budgeting purchases.
[3] Play money is a common type of game resource that can be earned, spent and lost.
[6] A further decline in popularity has occurred because inflation has placed most coins of actual currencies within the spending abilities of children, obviating the need for play money as a cheap substitute.
[6][7] This has led to a whole economic system that has no analogue with physical game money, with virtual trading indexes, and currency exchange mechanisms for countries that do not accept real currencies like the United States dollar.
[8] Whereas Monopoly money is tangible and physical and only exists within an economic system controlled by a single game board, virtual currencies are intangible and exist within an economic system that spans multiple on-line games and extends to the currency of the real world.