Spent
05418 | Design Educational Games | Prof. Erik Harpstead
Game Metadata
Game Name | Spent
Designer / Developer | McKinney
Sound Design | White Noise Lab
Client | Urban Ministries of Durham
Platform | Web Browser (either Mobile or Computer)
High Level Instructional Goal | What it’s like to live in poverty…
Link | https://playspent.org/
Brief Description
Spent is an interactive game that teaches players about surviving poverty and homelessness. When you first visit the website, you’re met with the slogan “It’s just stuff. Until you don’t have it.”. And when you click to continue through this page the game presents to you — capitalized and bolded — a challenge to prove that you wouldn’t need the help of the non-profit organization Urban Ministries of Durham, which provide supportive services for those in need. If you do accept this challenge, the player is then put into a scenario where they are unemployed, their savings are gone, they are homeless, with only $1,000 left. The goal is to live off of this $1,000 and survive in one month.
Learning Objectives
What kind of prior knowledge does it assume they have?
Given the context from which the game places the player in, it is assumed that there should be some prior knowledge on how jobs, home ownership, and savings work. This is because at the start of the game, the player is presented as someone that is unemployed and lost their savings, as well as their home. But, should a player go through the game without knowledge of these concepts and make “guesses” on decisions throughout the game, the player should more or less understand how those concepts work.
And as for the more basic expectations, players are expected to know how to use either a touchscreen or a mouse and keyboard; depending on whether the player chooses to play the game on their mobile device or their computer web browser.
What skills or knowledge does the game expect to be learned by the player?
The player is likely to learn about the experience of what a person in poverty has to deal with. And what I mean about the player learning about the experience is that the game provides a more informational view of poverty. More specifically the player will learn more about poverty with many real world examples. McKinney’s development team utilized actual statistics from Durham to inform some of the features within the game. For example, Durham’s fair market rent values were utilized to inform the rent slider, when the player has to choose whether to live close or far from their place of work.
In this particular case, players will learn that the lack of affordable housing is the number one cause of homelessness through a pop-up information window. This inclusion of real world data provides a the game with incredibly real situations from which the player must navigate through.
Within the game, you are only given $1,000 to survive for a month. As the player progresses through this month, they will learn how sudden or volatile changes in employment, housing, medical costs and other expenses can be. And often they result in the player losing the game by running out of money before the end of the month; in real life, losing translates to very severe consequences, possibly death.
Once the player has played through at least one session of Spent, they will have developed a better understanding of what a person in poverty may have to live through. But, I just wanted to acknowledge that as someone that is fortunate enough to have never experienced poverty, playing this game will not give you a full understanding of what it’s like to live in poverty. I’m not saying this is a bad game that didn’t meet its goal, but there are limitations as to how far an interactive game like Spent can have players “experience” what it is like to live in poverty.
What possible transfer opportunities could there be for this knowledge?
The main goal of this game is to teach players what it is like to live in poverty and homelessness, as well as how to survive it. Throughout the game, there are elements that supplement this goal and bring complexity into the game. For example, there is the option to find a job; once a job is chosen, a breakdown of the pay.
While this is a super simplified way of looking at the concept of a job, the game does provide an accurate representation of what an employed person living in Durham would be payed. The game provides a timeline as to when a player would get paid (in this case, weekly), pay before / after taxes, and required health insurance. This knowledge presents the player with the opportunity to potentially have a basic understanding of how jobs work and what it provides.
Game Elements
Mechanics
Spent is a very simple interactive game where the player only needs to read the event descriptions and make a choice by clicking on an option. Now, most events are provided with 2–4 options and are mostly followed by a result message with some information regarding the choice you made. But there are also some events where you are able to use your social media to help you survive the month. This option could be labeled as borrowing money from your friend to asking if they could store something for you.
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As the player moves through each day, they are presented with dilemmas which they must resolve. However, the player will encounter difficulties in coming to a solution, as the player must consider their starting amount of $1,000 as well as being presented with equally disagreeable options. The game ends when the player has either no money left or they made it to the end of the month with some money remaining.
Dynamics
As players continue to play the game again after their first session, they will being to understand what choices have to be made to make it to the end of the month. Taking the hand-me-down coat, not buying your child a uniform and equipment to join a sports team, not letting your child get ice cream when the van comes, or skipping out on a free concert because you need to watch your child. And as I played through the game, I quickly learned that to ensure you would make it through the month, you can choose to go with a purely financial route only picking options that either don’t cost anything or gives you a money.
While the player is going through their first run of the game, I can definitely see the player constantly questioning themselves as they consider the many dilemmas presented by Spent. Should I choose to pay for one bill over another? Do I have the necessary funds to go through with this? What groceries should I get? What should I not buy?
During subsequent play throughs, I found that I stopped asking myself these questions and found out that with most of the dilemmas presented, there was would always be an option that presented no consequences, in terms of money which is the most important element to the player. And I believe that because of this, players may get bored only after a couple of play throughs.
Going back to the social media aspect of this game, where you can sort of “phone a friend”, this feature can be exploited. There were times in the game where I would be very close to losing all of my money, but when presented with a situation where I am able to, for example, borrow money from a friend, I can click on the share button for Twitter to trigger a pop up window. I’m not too sure what exactly is allowing me to do this, but I believe that the game checks whether the button is clicked to give you the benefits, rather than checking if you shared a post or not. In my opinion, this is a game breaking ‘bug’ that ensures you survive the month, which defeats the purpose of the game, which is to illustrate the difficulties of surviving poverty and homelessness.
Aesthetics
The game has an overall vibe of being dark and depressing. The music that plays in beginning as the introduction message is being animated sounds really gloomy and sad, which does match well with the situation the game is putting you in: you only have $1,000 left and you are in poverty and are homeless.
Moving towards the latter play throughs of the game, it definitely got boring very quickly, as I found out that there are choices that you can choose that don’t have any consequences and therefore increase your chances of surviving the month. There was also the Twitter exploit I found, where you can click on the button but not actually sharing, which still gives you the benefits of the social media option.
Learning Mechanisms
Guided Attention
Spent provides detailed descriptions of the dilemmas that the player encounters throughout the game. Features are also labeled in a way to help players quickly identify its use.
Variability
Throughout Spent, there are a variety of different dilemmas which the player must consider. Whether it be choosing how far to live or choosing which bills to pay, it is the goal to ultimately survive poverty and homelessness.
Spatial Contiguity
Looking at the sidebar functions, the purpose of the elements on the bar are clearly labeled with text that are close to the graphics or icons of these functions.
Anchored Learning
Throughout Spent, the dilemmas presented to the player are all grounded in real-world data. McKinney’s development team utilized actual statistics from Durham to inform some of the features within the game. For example, Durham’s fair market rent values were utilized to inform the rent slider, when the player has to choose whether to live close or far from their place of work.
Also, the jobs presented by the game were also created with data from Durham in consideration.
Overall Critique + Final Thoughts
Spent by McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham is an interactive game that aims to teach players what its like to live in poverty. The game provides really compelling scenarios and presents players with information based on the actions they chose to take for each dilemma. This ensures that any player that goes through the game learns something new when they are trying to survive the month. I believe that this game is great, in that it brings awareness to the issues of poverty and homelessness.
However this only really applies to the first play through, where the player has not experience with the dilemmas in the game. Upon subsequent play throughs, it is very likely the player will figure out which choices don’t matter, in terms of financials, or they may even discover the Twitter share button exploit.
But overall, I think that Spent is a great game in that it is very informational and increases awareness of such issues, however the experience I had on subsequent play throughs and the Twitter exploit was counter productive to the goal in that it made it so that you would definitely make it to the end of the month with a generous amount of money. This really doesn’t help the game achieve its goal of providing an educational experience on what it’s like to live in poverty. So in my opinion, Spent is a good educational game in informing players of the problems of poverty, however the issues I mentioned earlier really diminishes the efforts of the game in educating players on what it’s like to live in poverty.
