I went home for Thanksgiving to enjoy food, family, and video games, of course. After explaining the concept of Spent to my parents, they were interested in playing it, so that night my dad and I watched my mom play. I was very curious to see how her play would differ from mine, considering she has almost no experience playing games, but plenty of experience with budgeting, work, and raising kids. What I found was that she approached every situation as though it were really happening to her, whereas I acted with the knowledge that I was playing a game many times.
This difference manifested in many small decisions. When choosing where to live, I chose the cheapest option even though it was 50 miles away from my job, for no reason other than that it was the cheapest. She also chose a home far from her job, over 40 miles, but didn't go the full 50. This makes sense if you're trying to balance cost with the time it takes to go to work every day, but this is only a consideration outside of the game. It would only be a concern if you had to drive to work every day, but the game puts this aspect of your life into the background. We each encountered another situation which wasn't purely financial: whether or not to give our child ice cream. When this happened with my family, my dad said that this decision was an easy one, and I agreed, since I quickly dismissed it as an unnecessary cost. My mom, on the other hand, said that it was hard because the child had a friend over, and bought them ice cream. The friend was a detail that I hadn't really considered because I viewed the decision as spending money on something frivalous, but she considered what the decision's consequences would be outside of the obvious financial goals, and even what the game directly said.
During my own playthrough, I did make some decisions based on criteria other than money, but I felt I only did so when my finances wouldn't be too different no matter what my decision was. For example, I had the option to return a 20 dollar bill someone on the street had dropped or take it for myself. I returned the money because I thought it wouldn't really help me pay the bills the game threw at me, which were hundreds of dollars. When I had to make larger decisions, such as keeping our pet or paying these bills, I didn't hesitate to choose the free option. I had lost my income by this point, and tried to avoid spending money as much as I could. My mom also lost her job about halfway through the month, but she spent more money than she had in the bank, presumably because she wasn't expecting a game over, and didn't reach the end of the month.
The difference between our playstyles makes me curious about the studies conducted around this game. In class, we were told that some groups showed that the game was very successful in generating sympathy while others showed that it was rather unsuccessful. I wonder if people who treated the game as just a game had less sympathy because they felt there were options that were objectively better than others, and thought that this meant impoverished people had made the wrong decisions (though to complicate this hypothesis, I did not have this opinion even though I metagamed). People who fully considered the nuance of each decision, however, might've been more sympathetic to people struggling with unemployment since they may not have seen as many "correct" choices. It would be interesting to see if these studies asked the participants about their previous experience with games and if they acted solely towards the goal of surviving a month or how they would realistically act in this scenario.