Only One Month: Procedural Choices in SPENT

In our discussion of SPENT on Monday, we were asked to think about the ending of the game. In my opinion, this was one of the most dissatisfying parts of the game. If you make it through the game, you are told "You made it through the month with $X (But rent's due tomorrow)." Your remaining money and outstanding debts are shown in the corner but for you the game is over, you are free to leave your debts behind and never think about them again. I think this is a missed opportunity for this game. When I played for the first time and “won” with thirty or so dollars left, I felt like I had gamed the system. For me, this game would in some ways be more powerful if it forced you to fail. With my remaining money, had the game gone on one more day I would have lost because I would not have been able to pay my rent. And although I knew this, the fact that I didn’t actually have to face it made the consequences seem a little less serious.

While I think that extending the time period of play could have a meaningful effect on the message that SPENT is presenting, I can also understand reasoning behind allowing players to “win” the game sometimes. I think that presenting a game where the player always eventually has to fail sends an incorrect and harmful impression about people living paycheck to paycheck. With this mechanic, I think that some people could come away with the idea that people living paycheck to paycheck are in a hopeless situation and are bound to be stuck in it. Giving players the ability to see some success presents a more realistic picture of the varied experiences of poverty.

Another point we talked about in class was how people playing the game sometimes came away with the idea that people living in poverty are responsible for their own misfortune due to the decision making mechanic of the game. Here again, I think the mechanism in place makes sense. One of the game's goals is to help players to understand the challenges of living in poverty and placing players in this mindset by forcing them to make difficult decisions helps to do this. However, I could imagine another version of this game where players had little or no choice. Instead, their money would be lost or gained by a series of random event over which they had no control. While I think that this would help to portray the idea that people are responsible for their own challenges, I think the game would also lose some of its ability to place the player in the role of someone in poverty. Rather than experiencing the challenges "first-hand," it would be more like watching someone in poverty struggle which is not as powerful and, I think, would have less effect on the player.

These two game mechanics, and possible ways to handle them, demonstrate a small example of the complexity of accurately representing complex and serious topics through games. Looking at just these, I find it hard to imagine a way to accurately represent serious topics like this in games. For one, it is difficult to even define accurate in these contexts. Because people's experiences are so varied, "accurate" becomes a somewhat subjective term. This in part makes me wonder if the topic is too much to take on in a video game? It requires a complex balance of presenting an experience in an understandable way without over-simplifying and mis-representing it or over-complicating it in a way that the message is lost on the players. In SPENT, I think a lot of the meaning comes from the rules and mechanics and that they create specific ways to think about this experience. I wonder if an anti-proceduralist approach to these sorts of games would be more effective in creating a meaningful experience. I personally think that a game that relied more on both procedure and interpretation to spread its message might be more successful.