I played the game Spent, created by the ad agency McKinney in collaboration with Urban Ministries of Durham (article link here).
Spent is a game about living with financial insecurity and the difficult decisions one needs to make as a result, with a specific focus on homelessness and poverty. In this game, your goal is to make it through a month with minimal savings, living paycheck to paycheck. As the game progresses, you are forced to choose where to spend your time, energy, and money, with consequences for each choice.
This game uses “challenge” and “narrative” as its types of fun. As I reflected on what interactions created the “challenge,” especially since this game is single-player, I thought it was interesting how your character comes up against obstacles put forth by different institutions (e.g., banking account, rent, taxes, health insurance, arguably even capitalism) as well social expectations (e.g., stigma of being seen as “poor,” your kid not having a birthday present to bring to the party because you don’t have enough money).
The “narrative” element fleshes out these obstacles by providing a context and personal entry point or connection to your character, raising the stakes. I also thought it was interesting that the player has the agency, and thus responsibility, of carefully choosing how the narrative unfolds, increasing the player’s personal investment and empathy. When I played the game the first time and “failed” to make it through the month, I remember immediately wanting to try again as well as realizing that, unlike for many, I could redo my choices.
I broke down the MDAO framework in reverse, as Heather Browning does in her chapter to ensure the player remains centered throughout all parts of the design and analysis process.
I saw the “Outcome” for Spent as twofold:
- Donate to Urban Ministries of Durham (UMD)
- Teach people what it is actually like to live without financial security
Behind these intended outcomes, I believe the mission of this game was to improve the lives of those living with food and financial insecurity, through the intervention of educating and mobilizing people who do have financial resources to help.
Even before I knew McKinney was an advertising company, the first intended outcome was very evident because regardless of if you made it through the whole month or not, the game always ended with the following screen, directing you to donate to UMD:
This outcome falls into the category of “behavior change” (Browning, p. 118) as it hopes to motivate people to donate money who otherwise might not have. However, referring back to Browning when they state that behavior change calls for a “lasting effect” and the importance of “self-efficacy” in encouraging such a change, I wondered how a one-time donation could lead to long-term behavioral change. This game seemed to challenge players’ “self-efficacy” in living at or below the U.S. poverty line, relating to Spent’s second intended outcome of shifting the player’s “attitude” through “information.”
With “Aesthetics,” the emotional stakes are raised with the combination of “Challenge” and “Narrative.” The first screen that you see after clicking the play button (see image below) directly addresses and throws you a challenge. This challenge serves as the initial buy-in (which you even have to “accept!”), and continues to grow increasingly harder as the choose-your-own-adventure structure of the narrative forces you to become an active participant in the story.
The “Dynamics” heighten the the challenge you face (and feel!) with the following features:
- Your bank account balance, containing often dwindling, only occasionally increasing dollars, and forcing you to budget for the month
- Day tracker, marking how long you have to go to your next paycheck, let alone to the end of the month
- Job strikes, keeping record of decisions that cost you money and job stability
- Multiple-choice options, which either reward or punish you, thereby affecting the above features (so make sure you make the right choice!)
These Dynamics also heighten the narrative aspect, with “dramatic tension” (Hunicke et al, p. 3) created when the dollar amount goes down in your bank account, or when new scenarios push you into conflict with other characters (oftentimes requiring money to be resolved). This tension is only temporarily released with paychecks, short-term side hustles, or “Results” that provide real information or research related to the issue you just faced. These narrative dynamics helped me, as the player, connect my gameplay experience to real-world experiences that many people face living at or below the poverty line.
Finally, the “Mechanics” of having to make a choice every “day” to progress in the game, combined with trackers indicating the financial and social impacts of those choices (e.g., the account balance, job strikes, debts, etc.), without knowing or having a say in what scenario would next occur, helped create an immersive and interactive experience for me. In their article, McKinney Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Cude talked about being both financially and “emotionally” spent by the end of the game, the latter I hadn’t realized I was feeling with each play through until put into words. The mirroring of this emotional (and physical) labor in the game highlights, to me, how effective the game mechanics are towards the designers’ intended outcomes.
