Basic Information
Game Name: Spent
Developer: McKinnon (Durham based add agency)
Platform: Web-based
High-level Instructional Goal: Empathy towards poverty
Brief Description
In spent you play as a person who has recently reached a financial rock bottom in the US. You have lost your job and house and are drowning in debts. You must now survive a month (30 days) in this situation. The first choice you make is which job you will apply for and the second is how far from work you will live.
From there, the player is presented with additional choices that they must make in their attempt to survive in unfavorable conditions. A usual day in the game consists of one or two choices. All of the choices have to do with money. Usually, the option that would save more money includes some form of a loss in some other way (i.e. taking your child's birthday money or skipping a bill payment). After many of these choices, a blue pop up appears with a small emotionally charged factoid related tot he choice you faced. The game overall takes about 10-15 minutes to complete.
The first time I played it I left with mixed feelings. I played it twice in a row. The first time I approached the game with my usual empathetic tendencies and wasn’t able to make it thirty days because I often would make choices like paying for something I broke and trying to pay all my bills on time. On my second play-through, I focused on making smarter choices to survive and ended the month with $33. I decided to play a third time. On this attempt, I put empathy aside and chose cold, hard pragmatism over kindness or social responsibility at every choice. I skipped bills, went without insurance, avoided joining a workers union, drove away from the scene of an accident, and took my kids birthday money. I splurged on groceries and finished the game with plenty of money to spare. The ending screen was almost exactly the same, except MUCH less impactful.
Learning Objectives
The game assumes its player has a few pieces of prior knowledge. One of these is a basic understanding of personal finance. This means that the game would not work for kids who do not understand bills, insurance, and why these decisions are intended to be impactful. Players also need an understanding of the United States financial system and the many costs of adult life and having kids. The game does not build up an attachment to your supposed child or your pet but instead relies on the player to inject that experience and attachment into the game. Players will also be able to know how to read in order to interpret the messages from the game.
The game educational objective is clear and is elaborated on in the advertising agency’s website where they state that the game was built “…to help people understand how hard it is to live on the brink of homelessness.” (source) To restate this in other terms, they aim to create or increase the player’s empathy for the impoverished. The educational metric on which this game could be judged, then, is the player’s feelings about empathy at the end of the game as compared to their thoughts at the beginning of the game.
I believe there may be no potential transferrable skilled gained from play, as its main goal is an increase in empathy towards a specific cause or situation. If I were to try to make a case for a transfer a skills, it could potentially be a stronger understanding of the experience of poverty that allows the player to then see eye to eye with those who live within it. It offers a basis on which players can build a knowledge of the systems that cause and maintain poverty.
Another possible transferable skill is decision making under duress and a stronger ability to weigh a financial benefit against a moral or social good. While ignoring your moms suffering saved you $100, you still would be abandoning your mother. If you don’t have $100 at this point in the game, though, you don’t have a choice in whether to help your mom. The choice is still available to you. If you select to help, the game ends. This ability to weigh the pros and cons and act on it is a highly useful decision-making tool. In life, decisions are difficult and often the best choice isn’t a good choice. Players walk away from the game understanding that and having had practice making that kind of choice.
MDA
Mechanics
The main mechanic in the game is making choices. The player needs to consider their financial situation and what they can afford to react to situations. The struggle and difficulty of poverty are meant to be communicated in how the ‘better’ choice is often not viable. You never have enough money to pay off your loans or credit card bills, you cannot afford to pay for your car's repairs, and you don’t have the financial security to risk your job on starting a workers union. Where this fails, though, is in painting those who do survive months and years in poverty as morally skewed. Many times the cheaper option is cruel: you can either spend $100 on your mom's medicine or deny her help, you can pay for your dog's surgery or let it suffer, you can ley your child keep their birthday money or you can take it. Because the mechanic is choice what is communicated to the player is that these are the choices impoverished persons make and live with daily.
Secondary mechanics that exist within the game are asking for help and trying to earn quick cash. To earn quick cash, the game gives you the options to sell plasma, break your child piggy bank, or get a payday loan from a loan shark. While I haven't done the latter, I have done the other two while playing. The piggie bank gives you $16.23 and selling plasma nets you an extra $25. The payday loan is for $50. Asking for help requires the player to go public with their struggle. Along with a link to the game, the player must post to Facebook or Twitter to ask their friends for help with the present problem. This forces the player to wonder, would any of my friends help me if this was real?
There is a missing mechanic one would expect to be in this game: consequence. Your choices do not come back to haunt you. After a player realizes this, they begin much more freely exploring the ‘bad’ options that would make more money. Once you realize that fleeing the scene of a car accident won’t result in you losing your job or child, there is much less of a reason to stay and pay for the damages.
Aesthetics
The aesthetic of Spent is built on sensation and fantasy. The player is meant to immerse themselves in this persona and life and to take the problems they are faced with seriously. When you are presented with a choice of either going broke to treat your pet, putting them down for $50, or letting them suffer, it’s meant to hurt. This can be undermined by the games visual design, though. It takes considerable writing skill to add emotional weight to a scenario like that and just telling the player they have a pet and assuming they will love it is too large an assumption. The game doesn’t even specify what kind of pet. That leads into the additional problem of the game being too much of a blank slate. There is not enough fantasy.
There is also an almost accidental-seeming aesthetic of challenge in the Game. The first part of the game challenges you to survive a month. If you don't succeed, you try again. If you do succeed, you find yourself wondering if you could do it better, with more money at the end. As can be seen in the trio of end-game screenshots in the second section, I followed this path. In the end, I was able to complete the game with more money than they start you off with. I took the cruelest and most pragmatic path in the context of the game because it was the most lucrative and ‘won’ with $1047 in my account, enough to pay the rent.
Dynamics
This sense of there being a way to ‘win’ poverty is an interesting dynamic produced by the mechanics and aesthetics of the game. You have a score (your money), a time limit (the month), and a goal (finish with the most money). Seen through this light, it becomes quite clear why one study found that Spent is more likely to decrease ones empathy and understanding of people living in poverty (source). The study also found that the change in mindset was to think of poverty as a choice, or a series of choices.
There also rises another dynamic that works heavily against the games educational goal. This dynamic is relying on, and spamming, the ‘ask a friend for help’ option. Because of the way in which this mechanic is implemented, the game doesn’t enforce the act of asking for help. Once the pop up for Facebook or Twitter loads, the game lets you know you may have to repay your friend and allows you forward with no consequence.
Learning Principles
Spent’s intended effect is supported in the game by a few learning principles. One of these is the principle of providing immediate feedback on errors as is explained by John R. Anderson et. al. in their writings. As is shown below, the moment you spend more than you have, you lose the game. This supports it’s learning goal by enforcing that you can’t pay all your bills and handle daily occurrences with a low income as well as afford to apply yourself to try and escape your situation. Poverty is hard and not a choice. The implementation of this principle could potentially work against the game, though in how it avoids the effects of overspending.
Richard E. Mayer et. al. presented a principle called signaling in their writings on multi-media learning principles. This principle suggests that games should provide cues for their players on how they should process the material. This helps to reduce processing of extraneous material. In Spent this is implemented in the blue pop-ups that appear after some more difficult choices. Immediately after a decision meant to be difficult or unfavorable, the game follows it with an expansion on the topic. It explains how this situation is hard and is more common than the player may think. As in the situation below, though this is sometimes implemented in a weak way. Since this game is likely aimed at adults, having to go to the library to use a computer might not be seen as so terrible. Many grew up going to the library to use a computer. In other cases, the extra information is a helpful took to drive points home and take a personal gaming situation and apply it to those who’s lived experience this is.
The game also utilizes James Paul Gee’s Identity Principle. This principle asserts that learning involves assuming a new virtual identity in such a way that the learner has real choices and. This identity assumption also relies on an opportunity to consider the relationship between new identities and old ones. Players of Spent are not expected to take on an entirely new identity but to insert their existing identity into the game. Games that ask us to be ourselves are often not as strong at building a sense of immersion as those who give us a character to identify with. It’ difficult for a player to connect with themselves in an unfamiliar situation rather than connect with a more defined ‘Person A’ who takes pride in their morality but has XYZ problems and needs to make a choice. Players have no problem identifying with Majd when talking with Nour in Bury Me, My Love. The player doesn’t have enough context to place themselves in the role.
Synthesis and Critique
Spent was a successful campaign run by McKinney. The game was reviewed many times and gained some popularity. It’s solidified its place in transformational games earning listings on Games4Change’s and Games4Sustainability’s websites. After some less than shining reviews of the game, though a study was conducted to see its effects on players beliefs in meritocracy (where one's status is linked to their choices, talents, and abilities), which found that the game was more likely to have the opposite of its intended effect.
The games mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics were created with the educational goal in mind. They do not wholly support that goal, though. Challenging players and giving them an attainable win-state leads them to potentially want to beat the game. The mechanics support its educational goals on the surface but cause some issues. For example: why does my child's piggy bank not grow over time? Why can I only give plasma once? Why is the loan only for $50? As another example, why is there no limit or consequence for asking a friend for help at every opportunity or abusing the ask for help option? That could be categorized as nitpicking, though. The game does present players with impactful and truly hard decisions that hold the potential of making one think about the struggle of living below the poverty line. The biggest issue with the game is the lack of consequence. This, combined with the accidental challenge dynamic paints a very odd picture where to ‘win’ Spent, you need to throw away your moral compass and act with a cold and precise focus on financial gain and saving.
The game holds potential educational value if partnered with additional guidance on how to process and consume it. It also is an effort to bring transformational games into the discussion of a topic not often touched by games. While Spent might not be the best game to try and change someone's mind on poverty in America, it is a starting point.
