Spent and We Become What We Behold both say that the system you are inside shapes your choices more than you do. In Spent, poverty turns every decision into a choice between two bad options; in We Become What We Behold, the news cycle rewards a cameraman for filming only the most extreme moments. Neither game tells you this outright. Instead, the rules incentivize this behavior, which Ian Bogost calls procedural rhetoric in “The Rhetoric of Video Games.”
Spent
Spent was made by the agency McKinney for Urban Ministries of Durham, and it is free to play in a web browser. Its target audience is the general public, specifically people who assume they would never need help. You play a single parent in present-day America with $1,000 and one month to get through. First you pick a job (for example, a restaurant server or a second-shift warehouse job at $14 an hour), and then each day hands you a new problem, like whether to pay increased rent and how much to spend on groceries. I played the full month through to the end screen.
The genre is a choice-based budgeting simulation with a role-playing frame. That role-playing frame meant I was making their decisions myself. The mechanics are simple (a balance, a day counter, a stream of choices), but they lead to the dynamics of triage, where I need to be strategic on when and what to use my money on.
Spent’s unnamed rule is that you cannot spend money you don’t have. That rule is procedural rhetoric in Bogost’s sense; the game never says poverty traps people, it just makes it impossible. The “Need cash?” panel on the left of the screen offers quick money, but only through options like smashing your kid’s piggy bank, donating plasma, or taking a payday loan, where both solve your current problem by creating a worse one later.
The loop is similar to Bogost’s Animal Crossing example, where you learn about debt by living inside a loop of earning, buying and owing.
The message is that people are living in much harder conditions than most of us realize, and that we should do something about it; at the end, the game asks the player to donate $10 to people in the same situation. I think it mostly succeeded. It helped me understand what it feels like to make financial decisions when every option costs something, and it left me feeling empathetic toward people without stable work.
On the other hand, the decisions often felt too easy. I could skip things without much consequence, and I never hit the kind of wall the game wanted me to feel. That is a small case of ludonarrative dissonance: the story says “desperate,” but my play was “manageable”. Giving the player less money, or making skipped costs come back harder, would close that gap.
We Become What We Behold: what it is
We Become What We Behold is by Nicky Case, and it is free to play in a web browser on itch.io. Its target audience is the general public, anyone who watches the news or scrolls social media. You play a camera operator filming circles and squares. Calm, ordinary moments get no reaction, but the odd or alarming moments you catch become headlines, and those headlines change how the crowd behaves. I played to the ending.
The genre is a short point-and-click game with a timing element, where you have to react quickly when someone does something newsworthy.
The game’s argument lives in its scoring rule. Peaceful, everyday shots get nothing, while shots of conflict or fear get marked a success, so the mechanics push the player toward filming the most egregious moments. As the headlines escalate (one early one reads “Circle fears squares”), the crowd grows more suspicious and more violent. This is procedural rhetoric: Case built the incentive into the rules on purpose, and the only path forward is the one the real news business rewards. The possibility space doesn’t allow you to succeed by filming calm people.
The game escalates fairly quickly…
The message is that the tools we build to watch the world end up shaping it, and shaping us. I think this is mostly true of TV. For example, the panic over tampered Halloween candy was much larger than the actual risk, because rare cases kept getting coverage. The game shows the same pattern: most of its characters are calm and doing nothing much, but the news keeps emphasizing the extreme cases until one-off events read as normal.
I think it was partly successful. It explained why outlets, and social media algorithms in general, keep escalating to stay ahead, and it made me feel bad about how the incentives are set up. I don’t think it suffers from ludonarrative dissonance.
My criticism is that the cameraman has no reason of their own to chase extreme shots, and giving them financial pressure (say, rent he can’t pay) would make the incentive feel personal. It also ends without telling the player what to do next. Some general guidance, like how to take in less sensational news, would have turned the feeling into action.
What I’m taking into my own games
Spent closes with a concrete call to action, a donation, while We Become What We Behold leaves you with a bad feeling and nowhere to put it unless you think about it (which might make me more motivated to do the thing I thought of as I think it’s my idea?). Spent’s rules didn’t feel too hard enough, but its ending gave me something to do; Case’s rules had more of an emotional impact, but its ending gave me nothing. I want to combine the best elements of each, where I add pressure that feels real, and a next step once it’s over.
- Both games persuade through what they reward and what they rule out, not through what they say per se. I want to start from the rule I’m trying to argue for and build outward from there.
- Spent shows that if the constraint is too loose, players don’t internalize the hard choice and the message softens.
- Minimalism helps, but visuals carry weight. Spent’s plain text kept me focused on the choices, while Case’s visuals grabbed my attention. Simple visuals can add emotion without adding clutter.
I want to argue that the problem is the system, not any single CEO in the AI capabilities race. We Become What We Behold makes that kind of argument: no one in it is a villain, yet the incentive turns ordinary people against each other. Overall, both games convinced me that the strongest way to change how someone sees a system is to put them inside it and let the rules do the talking.
AI use disclosure
I dictated my gameplay notes and analysis; Claude (an AI assistant) organized and reworded them into this draft. I reviewed and edited the final version, and the opinions and gameplay observations are my own.
