Game: Spent, made by a collaboration between McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham.
The game walks the player through a month of life, giving the player different choices each day relating to real-world situations, often with a financial predicament. The problem the player has to overcome is living with limited income and having to choose priorities.
There are simulation and chance elements in this game, as the events that happen are seemingly randomly selected by the system and presented to the player, similar to how life has unexpected things pop up. The premise of the game is to simulate a month of a person’s life with a focus on finances.
MDAO framework:
The mechanics of Spent are fairly simple. The player is presented with a variety of choices each day, and must choose between an expensive “good” outcome and a less expensive “bad” outcome, or some variation of this. Sometimes there are choices with three options or non-financial choices that can cause you to lose your job (I found this out the hard way).
The dynamics can cover a wide range, as the player has around 30 choices to make. I will spare the combinatorics but it is certain that every playthrough will be unique. The actual interactions of the player are more or less the same between playthroughs, but the choices that are made are unique and lead to a very large range of possibility. The player also is able to experiment with different spending habits and see where that gets them.
The aesthetics of the game are generally similar to other playthroughs of the game. To play the game is a bit stressful, as you as the player have no idea what will happen on the next day or if you will be able to make it to the end of the month. Watching the icons of outstanding tasks pile up was super stressful, it reminded me of real life a little too much 🙁 The biggest aesthetic element is certainly Challenge, with elements of Discovery and certainly Narrative.
The outcome of the game is the raising of awareness of the financial situations and subsequent difficulties that many Americans experience just by trying to live day-to-day. The goal then would seem to be to raise awareness with more affluent Americans or non-Americans whose countries have better living situations. The statistics were a big part of the learning element of the game: after each choice there is some fact or statistic to go with the choice, which are often surprising.
Above we see an example choice that the player may have. Perhaps it was a bug, or maybe it was because I played as a frugal, anti-social person, but the “ask a friend” option never worked for me. I didn’t quite see the intention behind this if it was on-purpose. During my first play I thought it was some kind of cruel joke, the only time the “friend” option did anything was when I hosted someone at my place for money… only to be charged for hosting another roommate, and the person refused to leave 🙂
This kind of dynamic was frustrating as a player, and certainly contributed to the challenging aesthetic… I was presented with a nice option which was impossible to get, making the challenge of the other two choices even more evident.
Overall great game, and very similar to a game I tried to make in-class last week.
