The game I played was Spent, which was made by a collaboration between McKinney and Urban Ministries of Durham. It’s a game about poverty and how difficult it is to stay afloat financially. This game is played solo, and the kind of play it uses is role-playing. In this game, you are somebody who is running out of money fast and needs to make financial choices to avoid going bankrupt. Every choice you make has a consequence, and that’ll impact how long you can stay afloat. For instance, the first choice you make in the game is what job you’ll take, and this impacts the rest of play.
We can apply the MDAO framework to analyze Spent. First, we can start with the mechanics. The mechanics of the game are pretty simple, where users need to simply choose options. After a user clicks on an option, the consequences of their actions are shown to them. Another mechanic is the balance on the upper left corner, which indicates to a player how they are performing. There are also some steps that simulate real-life events, such as buying groceries. 
As for the dynamics, they really start to show when you have used a lot of money. Players start making choices that might be unethical / feel wrong to them, like not paying their car payments or sending their kid to school sick, to save their money. Players are also given difficult choices, like choosing between different bills, forcing them to prioritize. There’s also a very real element I noticed where many choices involve giving up personal life events that impact not just you, but also people around you (e.g. seeing your kid’s performance vs going to work and making more money) that really enhance the dynamic of having to make difficult choices.
The aesthetics of the game are meant to elicit frustration at first, as you are forced into corners by your decision-making. It seems that if you make a single bad choice in the beginning, it can impact the rest of your gameplay. Additionally, even if you think you’re making good choices throughout, there can be some unlucky occurrence that sets you back. Eventually, players can even feel despair as they play multiple times but still end up broke at the end of the game.
As for the outcomes of the game, I think the main ones are attitude, information, and aesthetic. Before playing this game, some people may have had the attitude that those in poverty “did it to themselves” by not being responsible with their money. They may have thought that if they were in their position, they would’ve pulled themselves up. However, through this role-play game, it’s clear that making right decisions doesn’t lead to a fair outcome. The game also provided a ton of information about poverty and the unfairness of the system through the outcomes/consequences, which was an open space for educational materials. Finally, I think the feeling of frustration and despair the game crates is what will probably really stick with players.
