[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
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Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
I'm curious about a game genre that seems really niche. A poverty
or low-income simulator game that might put people in the shoes of
such folks, particularly showing the struggles of low-income people
in the USA without much of a safety net. There is SPENT
(https://playspent.org/html/). It's a linear, choose your own
adventure story, but not really a game, IMHO. I've seen a couple
apps on Google Play but they have under 100 downloads, and focus
more on stock trading. Is this a niche worth exploring? Would it
be possible to make a game that is both entertaining and
educational about the real challenges these people face, at the
same time?
Author : green-eclipse
Score : 97 points
Date : 2022-05-08 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
| danbolt wrote:
| Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor might fit what you're looking for.
| Or, dealing with the grind of a low-paying job is part of its
| loop.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/436500/Diaries_of_a_Space...
| vmception wrote:
| Agricola
|
| Not the same setting you described but its a frustrating one, it
| pretends to be a competitive game pitting the plays against each
| other but the mechanics for mere survival seem to override that.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Would it be possible to make a game that is both entertaining
| and educational about the real challenges these people face, at
| the same time?
|
| Sure, just play Monopoly with a handicap against people who are
| really good at it and who collude against you. Not many folks
| would find that fun though!
| [deleted]
| xwdv wrote:
| There is a game you can play in real life where you withdraw a
| certain amount of cash (i.e. a minimum wage paycheck after taxes
| removed) and then try to survive on that for two weeks, only
| using cash, and subtracting any expenses for subscriptions and
| rent you use during the two weeks.
|
| To make things more accurate, you could choose to modify your
| rent expense to reflect the kind of home you'd actually be living
| in.
|
| If you want to play hard mode, you could also increase the
| difficulty by simulating illegal immigrant status and get paid
| even less, maybe half of minimum wage. Almost certainly you will
| have to choose a cheaper home to survive.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Seems silly, this isn't going to be like poverty at all.
| Poverty isn't just low levels of routine spending.
|
| A better poverty simulator is, maybe, go ahead and keep your
| high level of consumption, but cancel all your insurance
| policies for a year. Including car insurance. That'll have a
| chance at provoking some poverty-like stress levels.
| xwdv wrote:
| That's just an uninsured simulator. People in poverty could
| still have insurance if they are paying for it. Low levels of
| routine spending can get stressful.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Well, it's not a simulation.
| tulsidas wrote:
| Back in 2006 there was a flash game called
|
| Ayiti: The cost of life
|
| Don't know if it is still around but it was about a very poor
| family in Haiti
| neilv wrote:
| IIUC, for better realism, you can't stop playing, you can't get
| new games, games you had before disappear, things outside the
| desperation game disappear, every week causes lasting damage to
| your console/PC health, government help with its Kafkaesque
| procedures stresses and humiliates you, neighborhood thugs
| randomly break down your door and use a hammer to hit your hands
| gripping the controller, but you still can't stop playing,
| because your only character is permadeath.
| mazsa wrote:
| Economics Simulation of Norvig:
| https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics.ipynb Not
| really a game either, but it's my favorite.
| todfox wrote:
| Jones in the Fast Lane: https://jonesinthefastlane.com
|
| You start in poverty and can work your way out, but you can also
| get trapped. It certainly gives you the feeling of the grind:
| eating only the cheapest food, earning barely enough, having no
| time after work.
| McNutty wrote:
| This was also the first thing that came to mind for me. It is
| very simple compared to what OP is perhaps imagining, but when
| I played it as a child the message definitely got through to
| me. I can't open your link but no matter, after
| several decades I still fondly remember getting a job at the
| burger place (and smart-ass comments about "you can save 6
| hours and flush those fries right now"), saving up and saving
| up until I could get better and better degrees and jobs, and
| finally ending up as the CEO of the bank or whatever.
| laristine wrote:
| "CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience" is one of the best games
| that gives you an immersive experience and challenge of an
| everyday homeless person.
| umvi wrote:
| Yeah it's a pretty depressing and challenging game. I beat this
| game with all the different scenarios. If you play long enough
| though, you can find a pretty simple formula to win: - Find the
| nearest homeless shelter that is near a job board - Take
| freelance jobs, putting the bulk of your earnings in a savings
| account and only keeping a little cash on hand for laundry and
| other things (otherwise it gets stolen at the homeless shelter)
| - Spend all the rest of your time at the library studying until
| you can get a higher paying job
|
| I'm not sure it's very realistic though because begging nets
| very little money and negative morale in the game, yet I think
| panhandlers can actually make quite a bit in real life in high
| traffic areas.
| naet wrote:
| I have done both spanging ("spare any change?")and busking in
| high traffic areas of California. Around Christmas I might
| make 80-200 dollars a day in a wealthy shopping district
| performing... but most of the time it was a couple of bucks
| and half finished leftovers, not a sustainable way to make
| money
| throwanem wrote:
| Being able to open a savings account without a fixed address
| is already pretty unrealistic.
| umvi wrote:
| The game requires you to have stayed at the same homeless
| shelter many days in a row before you are able to get an
| address and open a bank account iirc
| green-eclipse wrote:
| This looks amazing. Thanks for sharing.
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| I think it is a niche worth exploring. I have long thought of a
| vanlife game which would highlight homelessness. If anyone wants
| to work together on such a project just holler.
| walking_datura wrote:
| I've been thinking about a van life game too! - I traveled
| around the country in a travel trailer during the pandemic. Saw
| a lot of inner city homelessness, but also places like Slab
| City and Taos Mesa where people live an off-the-grid lifestyle.
|
| The van life community is pretty unique because van dwellers
| are oftentimes adventure seekers; the state of drifting is
| sometimes by choice. Though the lifestyle brings challenges
| regardless, like parking restrictions, space limitations,
| loneliness, high maintenance cost, etc. And most of all,
| vanlife is still outside of conventions and one can be judged
| for it. I'd love to explore these dynamics thru a game.
|
| P.S. Nomadland has been one of my favorite films. The book is
| just as good. There are millions who try to find peace on their
| own terms.
| reidjs wrote:
| Might be interested in building a game together with this
| angle. Would you like to send me an email? I'll put it in my
| profile for a short period of time
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| Emailing.
| daenz wrote:
| Frostpunk is similar to this
| https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/323190/
| green-eclipse wrote:
| Looks interesting. Seems to be more of a fantasy-dystopian
| "last civilization on earth" version of SimCity.
| daenz wrote:
| There's a lot of social problems that you have to cope with,
| like low food, low healthcare, forcing workers to shovel coal
| at gunpoint or else the whole outpost freezes to death. It's
| brutal.
| green-eclipse wrote:
| Wow. That's hard core indeed.
| [deleted]
| tonymet wrote:
| oregon trail? dopewars?
| tlb wrote:
| It could be most beneficial to people currently in poverty, to
| try out strategies for escaping it.
| verytrivial wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly how you're meaning this, but I think there
| is widespread ignorance around how people whom are poor are
| simply unable to improve their lot. It's often not about making
| the right choices and more there not being any choices.
| tejtm wrote:
| exposure to / awareness of what I would call "financial
| horizons" is the biggest thing for me.
|
| In poverty there is neither reason nor energy to waste beyond a
| conceivably actionable point. Learning to overcome that horizon
| is critical and I think it becomes more difficult the older we
| get.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Yes poverty is caused by people not knowing certain strategies,
| and those strategies are of course known by people who are not
| poor... come on.
| tlb wrote:
| The strategies for the first steps out of poverty are
| different from strategies to rise within the middle class. So
| they're mostly not known by people who aren't poor.
|
| For example, many government aid programs are (intentionally)
| obscure. Signing up for food stamps is so complicated,
| there's a charity that just helps people do it
| (https://www.mrelief.com). And there are plenty more
| strategies that help people, like for making cheap nutritious
| food. Any of these can be taught.
| wwilim wrote:
| That sounds like practicing standing up to school bullies by
| playing Street Fighter
| thimkerbell wrote:
| I would like for there to be a game where you started with a
| budget of $X, and the goal is to maximize its effectiveness at
| improving the lives of the ultra low income people in your city.
|
| Effective altruism on micro scales. And using ethical and legal
| means only, obviously, since the overarching goal is to be
| positive-sum.
| oneepic wrote:
| Night Call is in the ballpark, at least. You play as a taxi
| driver, budgeting your taxi trips, passengers, gas money, money
| for other things (ie newspapers or clues) to help solve a
| whodunnit mystery.
| gautamb0 wrote:
| If you have a vr headset, check out "Becoming Homeless" by
| Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Job Simulator possibly has some crossover with your requirements,
| and has decent feedback.
|
| https://jobsimulatorgame.com/
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| Just save a bit of money and then quit your job and see what
| happens when you stop paying your bills. The fact that you're
| that far removed from actual poverty is both highly encouraging
| and disgusting at some level.
| kurofune wrote:
| Pathologic 2.
| Alekhine wrote:
| I second this. Most stressful experience I've had playing a
| video game. You will most likely find yourself shanking some
| random person in the middle of the night for food, despite
| negative consequences. The game makes you desperate, very fast.
| dangus wrote:
| The early game in The Sims is kind of like a poverty simulator,
| but eventually it gets a lot easier.
|
| I assume that some mods and things of that nature can make the
| game more difficult.
| deckiedan wrote:
| I did a couple of in-person simulations with
| https://www.crossroads.org.hk/global-x-perience/ several years
| ago. 100% recommend contacting them to discuss ideas, and if
| you're ever in Hong Kong, they're a fascinating bunch of people.
| [deleted]
| Randfkkf wrote:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/632300/Hobo_Tough_Life/
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I played this game. It was depressing as fuck, the music really
| did a great job of setting in how much it really must suck if
| you end up this way. I went in feeling kind of bad that I was
| about to play a homeless person simulator and the experience
| was pretty much like... ok yeah this is a video game, but it
| doesn't trivialize the experience at all. It was also clearly
| set in a time period before massive meth and fentanyl problems.
|
| It's basically one of those survival horror games where you
| have to build a base with whatever stuff you find around to not
| die in winter. It seems like the people who played this game
| more than me were motivated to finish it because it's actually
| a pretty damn hard game.
|
| If you want to know the secret of how to win though here it is:
| It rains a lot in this game and if you get wet you become
| stinky so things get hard, but there's a few places to beg for
| change where it's dry. Try the exit to the train station and
| you will make thousands. It's hella menial but you just make
| way more money doing that than working the crappy in-game jobs
| on offer.
|
| I used to work in a homeless shelter where the fine gentlemen
| in there would joke about how people were stupid enough to give
| them money all the time. It's crazy how much money you can make
| on forgoing all sense of humility and exploiting people's
| sympathy in public. Addictive street drugs aren't exactly
| cheap.
| green-eclipse wrote:
| This looks really interesting, thank you.
| typon wrote:
| Love the cheeky backstory, from communisty dystopia to
| capitalist utopia, but not for you
| jugg1es wrote:
| $30 is surprising for a game about homelessness.
| maxbaines wrote:
| For sure worth a play, something about it really touched me.
| Bleak.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Banished does a good job at simulating a resource strained
| community where bad choices can have terrible consequences in the
| short term.
| t-3 wrote:
| It wouldn't be fun. Grind, grind, grind, never get anywhere. Work
| twice as hard for half the reward, then get fucked over in every
| other aspect of life. Games are about escapism, a chance to win
| at something, not experiencing bleak and abject failure for
| reasons outside of your control.
| green-eclipse wrote:
| Look at this thread. There's lots of interesting examples that
| are viable games. Not blockbusters maybe, but worthy of
| creation.
| jl6 wrote:
| I think if you succeeded in making a game that successfully
| simulated the experience of poverty, it would be extremely unfun
| to play.
|
| There is a popular misconception that poverty amounts to having
| your bank balance reset to zero. "Damn, guess I'll have to earn
| it all back". But what you can't reset or simulate is the human
| capital embodied within you that got you to this point. Your
| lifetime of education, your experience of problem solving, your
| strong network of contacts, your history of good decision-making.
| You also can't ignore the physical comfort that you, the player,
| would be in as you play the game. With all of that, you very
| likely could just earn it all back.
|
| That's not what poverty is about.
| BigBubbleButt wrote:
| > I think if you succeeded in making a game that successfully
| simulated the experience of poverty, it would be extremely
| unfun to play.
|
| I don't think you're someone that plays many videogame
| simulations, as the whole point is making something fun that's
| inherently boring in real life. There are so many popular
| simulators for famously mind-numbing jobs: farming, janitorial
| services (and further niches within this including
| powerwashing), driving for hours on an empty desert road (both
| as a trucker or as someone that's just bored), and more.
|
| Here's a great game that simulates trying to survive in an
| imaginary Soviet country. You pretty much always die, are
| coerced to murder people as part of your job, and usually watch
| as your family starves or freezes to death despite your best
| efforts to keep them alive. And you know what? I honestly think
| it's one of the best videogames ever made.
|
| https://papersplea.se/
|
| If the goal is to actually present the experience of poverty,
| then yeah it would be unfun to play by design. I wouldn't want
| that job in Arstotzka either, even if the game is fun to play.
| I'd also never want to be a truck driver, but I love the idea
| of doing it in a videogame.
| klyrs wrote:
| While I have never understood the existence of games like
| Long Haul Trucker, they do exist.
| lelandfe wrote:
| And there's a whole range of games intentionally meant to
| _not_ be fun - there are sad games, like That Dragon, Cancer.
| There are meditative games, games that will make you angry,
| and more. Video games are art!
|
| The person making this poverty simulator game could add a fun
| ludonarrative angle to it like Papers Please - _or_ it could
| aim to be realistic and encourage empathy for those
| suffering. This War of Mine is an example that strikes a
| balance between the two.
| t-3 wrote:
| Uh, powerwashing, (sand,dry ice, etc)-blasting, is actually
| fun in real life. If I could get a job doing only that, I
| would totally do it. Janitorial work is actually pretty
| engaging and fun, it's the having to do it EVERY DAY for
| almost nothing and being disrespected and socially maligned
| for it that sucks! Driving is also fun!
| manachar wrote:
| The interesting part of simulation genres is finding out what
| you need to change to make it fun.
|
| What makes a simulation game fun varies per game. Stardew
| Valley could be described as a boring loop. EVE Online just
| yesterday made fans happy by getting official Microsoft Excel
| support.
|
| The key seems to be to have a particular hook and perspective.
|
| So, for a poverty simulator, you could embrace hustle culture
| and have people race to exploit loopholes in systems to
| maximize return.
|
| Alternatively, you could take a radical approach at start with
| the crush of poverty and embrace it something like a rogue-like
| where you will probably always lose, but this time maybe you
| get a little further. Whether you want to embrace it
| ridiculously like Binding of Isaac embraced evangelical
| childhood abuse or be something else works.
|
| Also worth remembering Papers, Please as a good example of a
| simulation making something "not fun" fun.
| kennywinker wrote:
| > EVE Online just yesterday made fans happy by getting
| official Microsoft Excel support.
|
| That's the funniest single phrase I've read all day. Thank
| you for sharing that, it brought me great joy :)
| Bud wrote:
| What's even funnier is, it's actually true.
| webmaven wrote:
| It is probably a genre worth exploring. An interactive fiction
| game that explored a similar area is Depression Quest:
|
| http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html
|
| A hypothetical "Poverty Quest" (or perhaps "Precarity Quest")
| would have additional challenges, though, such as avoiding
| becoming Grand Theft Auto without glossing over the fact that
| criminality is sometimes the only seemingly viable career path,
| not to mention intersectional issues like race and class, food
| deserts and swamps, elevated toxic exposure (including lead) in
| low income neighborhoods, etc.
| ksaj wrote:
| I also thought of the GTA gameplay.
|
| With the focus of the game on poverty, there could be
| opportunities for small theft that has an "odds of being
| caught" attached. And of course with that comes the odds of
| having to pay a fine, which significantly cuts into your
| savings (if you have any). And with some odds of being jailed,
| that's a number of months with no income to pay rent at all,
| which probably means game over, if your goal is to avoid ending
| up on the streets or in a shelter.
|
| The incentives are similar to real life.
| webmaven wrote:
| Sure.
|
| Combine that with Depression Quest's narrative mechanism of
| graying out choices that aren't available to you (eg. applied
| to actions precluded by a deficit in impulse control, a
| common side effect of lead poisoning), and that could be very
| effective, especially if the player character is a child or
| adolescent which constrains the available degrees of freedom
| a bit more to something sane and tractable (eg. a kid might
| steal a stereo from a car, but it would be okay in that
| context not to have carjacking be an option).
| bondant wrote:
| Cart life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cart_Life
| DarylZero wrote:
| "He initially planned to finish the development in 30 days but
| he worked on development for three years"
|
| Can relate
| ecuzzillo wrote:
| Came here to say Cart Life as well.
| benrmatthews wrote:
| UK homeless charity Centrepoint created an experience in this
| vein - "In their shoes": http://centrepoint.org.uk/intheirshoes
| benrmatthews wrote:
| Related, for UK-based users and being discussed on HN now: "No
| fixed address bank accounts"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302310
| susiecambria wrote:
| The SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge. Learn more:
| https://www.moneycrashers.com/snap-food-stamp-challenge/
| lomereiter wrote:
| Check out "Hobo: Tough Life", it's at the extreme end of the
| spectrum, where you have to beg and steal in the beginning.
| ollieglass wrote:
| The game "I Get This Call Every Day" conveys some of the
| experience of working a low end job in a customer service call
| centre https://davidsgallant.itch.io/i-get-this-call-every-day
| nathias wrote:
| the genre should be RPG grind with hardcore resource management
| and psychological horror
| markdeloura wrote:
| The one I think of immediately is CHANGE: A Homeless Survival
| Experience. Saw it in Games for Change Awards nominees and it has
| stuck with me to this day. 2D side scroller. Well worth your
| time. https://www.delveinteractive.com/change Definitely a topic
| which could really benefit from further exploration through
| games!
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Sims. Starting a regular
| game without any cheats sure felt like being poor to me.
|
| Browsing through the catalogue of stuff for your house and all
| you can afford is the most basic version.
|
| I'm sure this can be improved upon with mods. Afaik they already
| have apartments.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Ah, I recall doing that in a very old version of the sims, by
| having someone destroy all their money and live on an empty lot
| without a house. Placing some items was pretty much required
| (IIRC a cable spool that counted as a table or a chair because
| some animations/actions were impossible if there were
| absolutely no surfaces to place stuff or sit down in the lot)
| but you could do a lot with the (free!) newspaper and with
| various things accessible in town to clean yourself, etc.
| mLuby wrote:
| Generational wealth transfer and government subsidies are the
| only way out. At least that's what "The Sims 1 SS0 starving
| artist challenge" shows:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A9HvZ4vz74 (10min)
| FigmentEngine wrote:
| Something like games these by Jane McGonigal
|
| https://janemcgonigal.com/play-me/
|
| > I make alternate reality games: games that are designed to
| improve real lives or solve real problems. I've been making ARGs
| since 2001 -- and you can watch trailers for a dozen of my
| favorite ARGs below.
|
| > Many of my games challenge players to tackle real-world
| problems at a planetary-scale: hunger, poverty, climate change,
| or global peace, for example (see: EVOKE, World Without Oil,
| Superstruct)
| tialaramex wrote:
| Most important to keep in mind the caution from Pulp's "Common
| People", which isn't even about the sort of poverty you're
| describing but just the ordinary lives of people who wouldn't
| consider themselves "poor" at all.
|
| But still you'll never get it right / 'Cause when you're laid in
| bed at night / Watching roaches climb the wall / If you called
| your dad he could stop it all
|
| The thing we can't simulate about poverty is that it isn't just a
| game, that when you're sick and tired of it and feel you've
| learned what it has to teach you, you can't just exit and not be
| poor any more.
| sideshowb wrote:
| Cos everybody hates a tourist Especially when they think it's
| all such a laugh
|
| But at least in a game I suspect that's more obvious than it is
| to someone on their gap year.
|
| Well said, though!
| kennywinker wrote:
| Video games involve a lot of storytelling. Stories can be super
| powerful, and I think the world definitely has room for more
| games that depict and explore the experience of poverty. But
| that absolutely HAS to come from a place of direct experience.
| If you read a couple books, interview a couple people at a
| shelter, and then make a game - it won't be a poverty
| simulator. It might simulate the theoretical economics of
| poverty, or a birds eye view of the day to day mechanics of it,
| but that's not the same as the actual thing. SimCity is a city
| simulator, but it doesn't simulate what it's like to live in
| any city, or what it's like to be a city mayor or even a city
| planner.
|
| Video games can help people understand things, just like that
| pulp song has helped people understand, but just like the pulp
| song it has to come from direct first hand experience.
| bojangleslover wrote:
| >The Affordable Care Act requires you get health insurance. The
| good news? Your child is covered by the state. The bad? You
| aren't.
|
| According to benefits.gov you would qualify for medicaid on
| $1,441/month gross (the wage of the job I selected)
| onesafari wrote:
| Many don't know the USA has a very large safety net. Medicaid,
| medicare, social security, SNAP, TANF, SSI, LIHEAP, EITC, rent
| vouchers, pell grants, job training programs, etc.
| suifbwish wrote:
| Yea except it only benefits you if you are way below the
| poverty level. We need to make sure every one is benefitted
| so we don't deincentivize seeking higher paying jobs just to
| keep basic benefits.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| How do we pay for an expansion of federal benefits? The
| ones we have are already quite cumbersome on the federal
| budget.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Making the benefits universal would increase everyone's
| personal budgets to compensate.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Yep. Politicians for years have made it super hard to get
| benefits, and now decry people not wanting to work. There's
| a huge gap between "eligible for all benefits" and "makes
| enough to offset the loss of benefits", and no clear way to
| cross over short of getting paid $20+ an hour. Trying to
| make benefits reduce proportional to income would work, but
| requires a lot of bookkeeping and proof (and, of course,
| some political will), so that's unlikely to get
| traction...and raising the minimum wage to the amount
| necessary so that any job will take one over the gap is
| -also- politically undoable.
|
| So, yeah. Lots of safety nets, all of which require you to
| live in extreme poverty to qualify for, and which still
| don't equate to a reasonable standard of living.
| daenz wrote:
| It's not convenient to know that when your goal is to smash
| capitalism.
| DarylZero wrote:
| Not sure if you're aware of this, but it's just a lie, and
| the goal of telling that lie is political conservatism.
| Bud wrote:
| Aaaaand apparently, many also lack even the most basic level
| of clue about how many gaping holes there are in that net and
| how many people fall through that net.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Who doesn't know this? The problem isn't that there's no
| safety net, the problem is that navigating it is a maze and
| there's tons of cracks for people to fall through. Many, many
| people don't get the help they need because of that.
|
| Take rent vouchers: only some people who "qualify" actually
| receive vouchers because there is a cap on the total number
| the government gives out. Or the EITC: to get the full
| benefit your income has to land in a narrow band. Or SNAP:
| all sorts of weird restrictions, and tons of people who are
| eligible but who don't know to sign up
| DarylZero wrote:
| Or here's an interesting fact: SNAP (food stamps) have
| cost-of-living adjustments. When food prices go up, SNAP
| benefits go up.
|
| But SSI benefits count SNAP as income and there is a
| dollar-for-dollar downward adjustment for every increase in
| SNAP.
|
| So if you have SNAP, your SSI benefits will _decrease_ with
| an _increase_ in cost-of-living!
| rr808 wrote:
| If you own a couple of grand in assets you no longer
| qualify for SNAP. Which is crazy given that 15 million
| people rely on SNAP.
| DarylZero wrote:
| It has a convoluted mess of programs, often mutually
| exclusive, that each have separate requirements and "churn"
| people off their benefits regularly with complicated and
| recurring bureaucratic burdens.
|
| It's not actually "large" in the sense of total spending
| relative to other counties.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| It's also just not required
| nrjames wrote:
| This War of Mine has some aspects of a poverty simulator, albeit
| in a war zone. Papers, Please requires you to allocate your
| measly pay at the end of the day, somewhat encouraging breaking
| the job rules for kickbacks.
| bjourne wrote:
| That would be damn cool game!
| CyanBird wrote:
| Losing while playing Monopoly
|
| Other than that, nothing really comes to mind, and honestly
| nothing could replace the constant stress of not being able to
| pay rent, food and utilities at the end of the month, knowing you
| can't and still be unable to do anything to fix it other than
| taking a payday loan which you also know won't be able to pay,
| bonus stress points if you have got kids
| wardedVibe wrote:
| So disco Elysium is many things. Playing it was the first time I
| was extremely anxious about paying rent. One of the main ways you
| make money is collecting broken bottles.
| aindilis wrote:
| I've been working on some free/libre open source software for 22
| years designed to help people survive poverty and related
| conditions, such as homelessness, disability, illness,
| relationship abuse, emergencies, etc. It's called the Free Life
| Planner (FLP). The goal of FLP is to help people get on top of
| every security, such as food, water, financial, emotional,
| cyberphysical, etc etc. Its website is here:
| https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner I really need to
| rewrite the introduction to the FLP GitHub page since it doesn't
| explain the concept well enough, although the following use case
| does explain it more:
| https://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/homeless-story.html If
| anyone is interested in collaborating that would be fantastic,
| there's already a Vagrant image of FLP (but it's heavily redacted
| and out of date) available here:
| https://app.vagrantup.com/aindilis We're also working on
| finishing the installer for both FLP and the middleware that it
| runs on top of, called FRDCSA ( https://frdcsa.org ). The
| installer for FRDCSA when fixed up will be available here:
| https://github.com/aindilis/frdcsa-installer I would love to see
| a free/libre open source video game that used the tech involved.
| po1nt wrote:
| Isn't Papers Please built on this concept? Maybe not poverty but
| war/survival related is This War of Mine
| tejtm wrote:
| yes, but they are very expensive.
| g_log wrote:
| It's a long time since I played it but Real Lives
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives) might meet your
| criteria. You start as a child with some random traits somewhere
| in the world and try to advance your life. Some starts are a lot
| harder than others.
| green-eclipse wrote:
| Very intriguing and interesting concept. Their website
| (https://reallivesworld.com) really leans into the angle for
| academic use too. Thanks for sharing this.
| zwkrt wrote:
| I have experience working for a year in a homeless shelter. I
| think that there is a "papers please" or "a dark room" style game
| that you could make that would simulate what it is like to try to
| exist in homelessness.
|
| You have very few resources, many of which are provided by the
| shelter but only intermittently. You should expect your things to
| be stolen from you if you are around other homeless people (and
| to not be above stealing yourself), but going it alone has its
| own challenges. You probably have to juggle going to 3 to 4
| different shelters and various resource locations every week and
| sometimes two or three in one day. You never have enough food you
| never have enough water; there's never a place to go to the
| bathroom. You can't show up to shelter locations if you're on
| drugs, but drugs will definitely be a part of your life as
| there's something that you can trade and sell for money. On a day
| when you don't have enough resources at the very least maybe you
| could take drugs to ease the pain of not having eaten for a day
| or so, but of course this will exacerbate your overall situation.
| netaustin wrote:
| I played a version of this on Zoom as part of a Columbia
| University program [1] designed to simulate the conditions of
| re-entry from prison, which have considerable structural
| similarities to poverty and homelessness. The Zoom game is
| based on one played in person with "stations" representing
| different institutions and "tokens" representing stuff like
| money, birth certificates, ID cards, etc. Your hypothetical
| scenario is quite a lot like the mechanics of this game. I'm
| working on building a single-player software version of it
| because the live simulation is rather difficult to stage!
|
| [1]
| https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/r...
| the_only_law wrote:
| My brother networked his friend playing a game called something
| along the lines of "hobo simulator" I'm sure it's much more of a
| comical than serious game though.
| sumosudo wrote:
| Flip the DB board main switch at home. 100% real poverty.
| [deleted]
| syntheweave wrote:
| With the last round of "empathy games" (early 2010's stuff like
| Cart Life or Depression Quest, all of which got some play in
| academic game studies) one of the major objections that came up
| was that the player of such games may not carry this forward into
| any positive action their lives, but rather see themselves like
| the viewer of a TV sitcom, aggressively making things worse for
| their character for the sake of being a troll: "sucks to be poor,
| lol".
|
| If there's a correct way to produce an empathy response, it
| appears to be Undertale's model, in which the player spends most
| of the game thinking that they are beating the game by killing
| monsters and ignoring the signs that they actually made an
| ethical choice until it's too late, further hammered in by an
| extra layer of permanence in the game's save system taunting them
| for what they did.
|
| The downside is that this seems to mostly be a shame response,
| not a guilt response. Much of the resulting fandom casually
| overlooked the darker elements of the characters you're sparing,
| which are mostly revealed in postgame content. That is, the
| ethical behaviors are produced by manufacturing an attachment to
| the fictional universe, not by developing the player's philosophy
| of action.
|
| If you want to take on this type of game, addressing the player
| attachments is priority one. Otherwise they disengage with the
| content and aim just to break the game systems instead.
| StockHuman wrote:
| "Diary of a spaceport janitor" may not be a poverty sim, and
| looks from the color choices alone far from one, but it does
| capture a certain mood; a common feeling produced by the 'poverty
| wage in a bustling hub of wealth' life.
|
| Being a game, it's also an interesting take on exploring NPCs as
| a subject in games in a rather humanizing way, rarely do games
| treat them as having interior lives at all, or why far-out space
| fantasy still reproduces menial labor of our day without
| question.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| This is the game I would suggest too. In my opinion it
| absolutely is a poverty sim. You work hard every day, but due
| to basic needs plus unforeseen events you end up never earning
| enough money to escape. The path that is suggested to you as
| the only means of lifting your curse requires doing a
| significant amount of extra work on top of your existing work,
| in a system that feels byzantine and actively hostile to your
| success. I really hated playing the game, and quit after a few
| hours of getting nowhere, but I suspect that was exactly the
| point.
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