Spent, by McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham:
Spent is a game about surviving capitalism from the perspective of a low/no-income individual which incorporates experience, chance/uncertainty, and simulation-based forms of play. Below i cover each of these classifications in further detail:
Experience-based play in Spent:
Games, Design, and Play states that experience-based play is “a kind of play focused on providing players with an experience of the game through exploration, unfolding a story, or communal engagement.” In Spent, the player is hit with challenge after challenge, many of which involve your unnamed immediate family, your child, mother, friend, landlord, pet, etc. You experience each and every emotion that comes with making financial decisions that affect you and, at times, the people around you.
Chance/Uncertainty-based play in Spent:
Games of chance and uncertainty are ones “that ask players to develop strategies to allow for unpredictable moments or aspects of the game.” Like in real life, in Spent, financially detrimental events are unpredictable, along with the success of your efforts to overcome them. Because of this, players are naturally pushed in the direction of considering the consequences of every one of their actions and what uncertainties these actions may themselves cause. For example, at the beginning of the game, players are asked to choose between 1 of 3 jobs: a stable and well-paying, but physically demanding warehouse position, a well-paying but temporary office gig, and a varying-hour, tip-based waiting job. If you choose the warehouse position, the chances of you becoming unemployed for no reason are lower than if you were to have taken either of the other jobs, but you now have to worry about your back and buying good health-insurance, else one injury and you could be back in the rat race.
Simulation-based play in Spent:
Games, Design, and Play talks about The Landlord’s Game as a simulation-based play game, designed to “demonstrate the economic principles of Georgism…how rents make property owners wealthy and tenants impoverished.” Like the Landlord’s Game, Spent aims to demonstrate how difficult it is to even just survive at/under/around the poverty line. It presents the player with realistic challenges, forces them to make decisions they don’t want to make, and naturally leads them to the game’s intended political statement by giving them reasonable choices for what to do about each of their problems. Examples of how this is done include simulating shitty company policies, deteriorating personal health, and social attitudes towards poverty.
How MDAO Applies:
Spent makes various choices within the MDAO model to ensure that it demonstrates how difficult it is to even just survive at/under/around the poverty line. Its intended outcome could be classified under the behavioral, attitude, and information categories. I’ll describe its components starting from its outcomes (which we’ve already detailed above) and continuing with its aesthetics, dynamics, and mechanics in that order. Aesthetic choices like not attaching names to the in-game characters allow the players to focus on the game’s decision-making mechanics. A side-effect of this is that players begin to naturally/unconsciously attach names or emotional weight to the characters they encounter as they play, which i think serves its intended outcome well. I even felt myself going a step further and mapping the different events that occurred in-game to ones that have occurred to me and my family. Its dynamics are not too complex or mechanical, instead being more about long-term planning and decision-making. These dynamics are heavily reliant on the game’s underlying uncertainty/butterfly effect mechanics, which once again are implemented simply and clearly. None of the technical aspects of these mechanics are shown to players at any point in the game, which once again elevates the aesthetic outcomes of the game.
