Is Spent a Good Educational Game?
A few years ago, I encountered a game called Spent. I was just starting to explore and discover the work being done in serious games and educational games. I was excited: a game about poverty! Awesome! At first, I loved the game and often used it as an example of a good educational game when discussing the topic with people. Now, after some time has passed and I have learned more about games and about the causes and experience of poverty, I realize I need to re-examine this game. So, does Spent succeed as an educational game? If not, why?
About the Game
Basic Background
Spent is a Web-based game about the experience of poverty developed by McKinnon, a Durham based ad agency. Its primary high-level instructional goal is to instill a sense of empathy towards the impoverished in the player. Its secondary high-level goal is for the player to take action after the game or during by donating and spreading the word about the game and what they learned.
Spent’s Learning Objectives
On the advertising agency’s website, 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 level of empathy towards the subject at the end of the game as compared to their thoughts at the beginning of the game.
The Game
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 day in the game consists of one or two choices about money. Usually, the option that would save more money includes some other form of a loss (i.e. taking your child’s money or skipping a bill payment). After a few choices, a blue pop-up appears with a small factoid related to the choice you faced. The game takes about 10–15 minutes to complete.
My Experience
I haven’t played the game since that first time years ago. Back, then, I loved it! The visual design felt cleaner than the educational math and writing games I used to play and the tone felt as serious as I thought it should. I accepted all the lessons it taught and read every instructional bubble of text.
This time, I played it a few more times to see what messages the game was teaching me. I played it twice in a row. The first time I approached the game with my usual empathy, morality, and privilege and wasn’t able to make it thirty days — I often would make choices like paying for something I broke and trying to pay all my bills on time. The end screen came up with its somber call to action, asking me to share the game and donate.
On my next 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 now MUCH less impactful. Why would I fear my $600 rent if I had $1000?
What Does Spent Teach
Gameplay Lessons
To further look into what Spent teaches, I’m going to look at the play experience it offers using the MDA Framework. Let’s look at the ‘M’ first, the game's mechanics.
Mechanics
The main mechanic in the game is making choices. The player needs to consider their financial situation and how 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 let 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 people 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. 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’. The player must post to Facebook or Twitter, asking friends for help with the present problem. This asks 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
Here I am using the MDA Framework’s definition of aesthetic as the emotional experience and responses of the player. 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
In spent, this sense of there being a way to ‘win’ at poverty is an interesting dynamic. (Dynamics are the emergent behaviors that arise from gameplay.) You have a score (your money), a time limit (the month), and a goal (finish with the most money). Seen through this lens, 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 main change in mindset was to think of poverty as a choice, or a series of choices (the player's belief in meritocracy).
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. The player doesn’t even have to actually press the ‘post’ button to move forward and they are never asked to pay back the friend later on in the game.
A Bit of Learning Science
Not everything is terrible, though. Spent’s intended effect is supported in the game by a few learning principles:
- Providing immediate feedback on errors → John R. Anderson et. al.
- Signaling (provide cues on what to do) → Richard E. Mayer et. al.
- Identity (assuming a virtual identity gives the learner real choices) → James Paul Gee
Immediate Feedback: 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.
Signaling: 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. This is sometimes implemented in a weak way. Since this game is 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.
Identity: The identity principle relies somewhat on a comparison between the player's new identity and their old one. 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. This need for an identity compliments the signaling principle. Our identity helps inform how we make decisions. It’s also 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. In Spent, the player doesn’t have enough context to place themselves in the role.
Is this success?
Intended Vs. Actual Skill Transfer
Many educational games aim for some level of skill transfer. Essentially, something the player should be able to do or understand better after playing. Based on their core educational goal, the intended transfer is likely better treatment of the poor and a stronger understanding of the experience of poverty. The game offers a basis on which players can build a knowledge of the systems that cause and maintain poverty. This skill transfer was successful during my first play-throughs but was unsuccessful during my following play-throughs. In those, I had won. Since the game seems to try and emulate life, wouldn’t that mean someone in real life could do that and win too?
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 in this scenario walk away from the game understanding that and having had practice making that kind of choice.
Successes and Failures
So, in summary, where did the game succeed and fail? Are the failures so costly that the successes are negligible? I consolidated the above into a list to compare the costs and benefits of the game.
Spent 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. 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.
If one approaches the games with an ‘I want to win’ or an ‘I know the best choices’ mindset, the intended message goes over their head and instead they find that they can, indeed win. A tough follow-up question, in this case, is should there be a win state in a game that's supposed to create empathy about something that's often nearly inescapable?
What Could be Done?
After looking at the game for so long, I have a few ideas of changes that could help in addressing some of the problems with the game. A few suggestions are:
- More clearly surface the players level of debt as bills and other unaddressed costs pile up. Currently, they are listed individually on the side of the screen and are largely ignorable compared to your amount of money listed at the top.
- Surface the player's moral alignment and include appropriate consequences for amorality and cruel decisions. This would include consequences for illegal actions like fines, court dates that make you miss work, or jail time if you can’t post bail.
- Allow the player to go into the negative instead of immediately ending the game and make some choices unavailable (unclickable) due to prior financial choices, similar to how Depression Quest removes options as you become more depressed.
- Extend the in-game timeline to more than one month to show the unsustainability of taking crueler actions to save more money and the longer-term effects of having all our income be spendable income.
- Change the goal of the game to be something other than having enough to rent the next month. This would be similar to how Hellblade isn’t won by escaping psychosis.
Of course, introducing any of these changes could change the game in unforeseen ways. A lot of playtesting would need to be done in order to determine how effective they are in ensuring the success of Spent’s educational goals.
I’m glad these games are being made. They make people think about experiences outside their own more deeply than they often might and often guide player’s learning experiences towards a more empathic outcome. When played wrong, though, they became potentially dangerous and counterproductive. The only way to improve, though, is to learn from the mistakes already made, and keep making these games.
