Spent has problems - here's the one I've been thinking the most about after Tuesday's discussion.
If I die a lot in dark souls, I don't argue I would have ducked the blow in real life. Games in general require a suspension of disbelief, especially at times of failure, because their purpose in the failure is not to represent a failing in real life. Games, even ones meant to be representations of aspects of reality, understand all aspects of themselves to be rooted in that "fake" space. In this way, your failure is a failure in a curated universe, and not any universe the skins, enemies or platforms represent.
But in Spent, your simulated ability on whether you'll end up needing welfare is dictated entirely in a curated universe, where each obstacle is "skinned" to be an economic or societal hindrance is the escaping of poverty. Spent's webpage links to a document where each study used to create the challenges within the month is from, linking to an abstract or article on the findings.
But in this way, failure has nothing to do with the obstacles - it simply has to do with the number, difficulty, and persistence of them - something uncited and seemingly decidable by the creator of the poverty 'simulation'. When I lose in Spent, I don't lose to anything representative of the world - I lose to a game that uses the representations to create a difficult level.
Spent reduces poverty into a game of how many bad things can you endure. It demonstrates the case of how these bad things have consequence, but doesn't pitch an argument for why there are so many of them, and because we intuitively understand difficulty in so many games as a function of amount of barriers and problems, what those problems are are disjointed from what we understand to be why we fail.
Your gas is siphoned, your grandfather passes away, you crash your car and some circuit blows and the registration is due, your child needs a physical and you and them both get sick, your window is shattered, and your roommate won't move out. And when inevitably you don't have enough money for the next month's rent, you lose to the game, and not to anything else.
I believe that Spent does its job through inevitable failure in order to illustrate the futility of of the working class through the constant threat of extinction with a kind os Sisyphus-esque objectives. Had it been made with actually objectives that would have been completed, the game would fail in its purpose - because succeeding would prove the players superiority over the impoverished and the abject failure of the impoverished.
Both you and Matt have good takes here, and I would also like to add that a big thing I took away from playing SPENT was the immense degree to which these bad 'life events' have a greater impact on somebody in a precarious financial situation, even if the game doesn't communicate why these things are happening. It reminded me of the popular phrase "it's expensive to be poor." If you're in a precarious financial situation, it's a form of toxic stress that changes and amplifies the way you react to things like getting sick or breaking something. The game, to a degree, replicates that stress by putting you in that situation, and so it did serve a purpose in…
This is an interesting take on the difficulty of Spent, and I do think touches upon a valid criticism of the game, best summer up when you say that "it demonstrates the case of how these bad things have consequence, but doesn't pitch an argument for why there are so many of them". It is true that the game doesn't explicitly say why all of these bad things are happening, it more leaves that up to the player to decide. The main two options are: These are things that happen to everyone and are intuitively relatable, or these are a function of living under poor socioeconomic circumstances. I think the latter seems more likely, because few of these things …