Recently, I played a game called Spent, developed by the advertising agency McKinney for Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD). It is a poverty simulator where the player plays the role of an adult struggling with unemployment, rent, loans, and raising children. Over a 30-day survival challenge, the player must make various decisions about earning or spending money, trying their best to avoid being homeless.
My first impression of the game was that it is simple and clear. Spent is a text-driven game with almost no images. Its user interface uses a left-center-right layout to clearly display the three most important mechanics: on the left, the player’s balance, their “lifeline”; in the center, the scenario and choices, which are often related to the balance; on the right, the date, representing the game’s progress. Its gameplay also follows this simple and clear characteristic: based on the scenario, players make choices to ensure their balance stays above zero.
Figure 1: The game interface of Spent – choosing a job
Although Spent appears so simple, it still provided me with an immersive aesthetic experience. The game’s narrative is powerful. At the beginning, it challenges the player to “prove you don’t need help,” and then uses a series of short phrases to immerse the player in their role: “your savings are gone, you’ve lost your house, you are down to your last $1000. Can you make it through the month?” Throughout the game, the narrative is accompanied by a continuous stream of challenge experiences, showing the various situations a player (as someone in poverty) might encounter. In these challenges, the player’s choices, acting as the game’s dynamics, affect following scenarios, leading to a personalized gameplay experience (for example, if you miss too many days of work, you get fired; if you choose to give up your car, you must find other ways to go to work, which can lead to being late and having your pay reduced). Further enhancing the challenge experience is the fact that many choices come with ethical dilemmas. What impressed me most was when my child wanted to join a school field trip, which would cost $15. But I only had a little over $100 and could hardly justify this “non-essential expense.” In the end, my child had to stay at school alone. At that moment, I also felt my child’s loneliness and resentment toward their parents, and on a deeper level, the parent’s helplessness.
Figure 2: The choice for the child’s field trip
What transforms the aesthetics into outcomes is the result that appears after each choice. If I chose to go to work instead of attending my child’s school play, the result would show the fact that “parents with low incomes tend to be less involved in their children’s schooling and extracurricular activities.” This made me reflect on my primary school days, when there were classmates whose parents never showed up, who didn’t join school trips, who wore dirty clothes every day, and were sometimes laughed at. Experiencing this situation in the game allowed me to empathize with them—it’s not that their parents didn’t love them, nor that they weren’t trying hard enough. When poverty truly engulfs us, we might not make better choices. In addition, the result system also uses a lot of real data, which taught me for the first time that “each year almost 15 percent of American households had a hard time getting enough to eat at some point.”
Figure 3: An example of the Result interface
Throughout the game, I was constantly trapped in a state of depression and anxiety, praying for the month to end quickly. Unfortunately, on day 26, I went insolvent because I couldn’t pay my credit card bill. On the Game Over screen, the text appeared: “GIVE $10 to help someone living SPENT. DONATE NOW.” Clicking the link took me to the UMD official website: https://umdurham.org/. The organization’s mission is that “Urban Ministries of Durham connects with the community to end homelessness and fight poverty by offering food, shelter and a future to neighbors in need.” It was only at this moment that I truly understood the behavioral changes the game wanted to inspire in players: to understand and empathize with the homeless and to offer them help. This outcome was hidden very well within the game. While playing, I was immersed in a lusory attitude and had not realized the game was developed by a real organization dedicated to helping the homeless. But after realizing its purpose, the experience of role-playing as someone in poverty generated strong empathy—I was only experiencing it in a game and couldn’t even last a month, while they are truly suffering from these challenges. The in-game motivation to “survive” was transformed into the real-world action to “help them change.” Therefore, after confirming that the organization is still active, I purchased the naming rights for a teddy bear. Perhaps this money can help UMD make a difference.
Figure 4: Purchasing the naming rights for a teddy bear
Figure 5: My donation certificate (Bartholomew is my Teddy Bear’s name)
This gameplay experience made me feel the power of serious games, especially in their design for a specific outcome. The game doesn’t announce itself as a “charity game” at the start. Instead, through the player’s authentic role-playing of a person in poverty—especially by experiencing how they make difficult decisions—and by presenting real data, it allows the player to experience the mindset of someone in poverty in a fictional, safe space, thereby generating empathy. Finally, it reveals the donation portal and the developer’s real-world purpose, transforming the player’s in-game emotional journey into real-world behavioral change. In conclusion, this game demonstrates the application of the MDAO framework in serious games and successfully changed my behavior.
