When reading Anable’s “Games to Fail With” article, she mentioned that one interpretation of why gamers expect failure is that “it allows us to experience the feelings of shame and anger associated with losing but ultimately dismiss these feelings as just a game” (Anable, 110). However, I would argue that Spent serves as more than just a game and in fact, uses failure as a technique to raise awareness about the realities of poverty. In Spent, you have lost your job, lost your house and are left with $1000, in which you are tasked with surviving the month. There is an element of cruel optimism that is apparent within the game as I was under the impression that after being able to successfully make a payment, my fortunes would turn around.
Unfortunately, the short-term relief or “success” of having a balance left in your account turns into a failure, as more and more unpredictable payments start to pile up. It gets to a point where you are overburdened and, in many situations, have to make much need sacrifices. In essence, the game was specifically designed for there to be no good solution at hand, and failing is in fact, ironically, the goal of the game. By failing, you leave with a stronger understanding of the everyday struggles that individuals of lesser means are faced with.
What is even more interesting is how it allows for one to be immersed in the game, which it does so by the binary and ternary choices available. In many scenarios, one of the options is to ask your friend for help. This game puts you in the scenario of you sending a “Facebook-type” message to a friend and forces you to feel the possible shame and embarrassment of asking others for money. Ultimately, through the use of failure, as well as the choices available, Spent allows for gamers to get a realistic understanding of the hardships of poverty, which is a reality that many of us are numb to even today. If one were to not fail this game, I believe the function and the goal of this game would be lost.
Although how Spent handles failure is effective in creating a sense of difficulty, it is also the reason why it comes of as trivializing poverty to many. As you mentioned with the Anabel quote, the ability to experience the shame associated with failure and dismiss it is fairly unique to games. In film and television, seeing a charter fumble through an awkward situation causes me to cringe is discomfort, while the same situation in a game would be purely comedic. While the failure in Spent doesn't come across as funny, it fails to be impact because it can be dismissed as part of an inaccurate simulation. It allows players to come up with ways that they could have "survived" if…
The quotation that you reference might not necessarily be referring to the idea of why failure exists in a game as opposed to why gamers might enjoy failure in games. While I agree with your point that failure in Spent is used to help the player experience what it would be like to deal with the hardships of poverty, maybe it would be beneficial to look at Spent from the perspective of why we might be okay with and even enjoy failing within the game. Through Anabel's argument, we might say that in Spent, players are able to experience the difficulties that the game presents while getting to escape afterwards to their reality outside of the game. Perhaps she would…