Why SPENT Doesn't Seem To Push the Player

While I played SPENT noticed something that kept coming up. While the game was designed as though it was taking place over a month, it didn't exactly push the player to the limits. For example, there was a moment in the game where you are asked to purchase food. I did my best in this task to choose food items that would last if I were doing this in real life, but in the end I realized the items I had bought would likely not suffice throughout a whole month. Why would the game let me potentially under buy food, and essentially starve myself and my virtual family. Not to mention, what is my virtual kid eating while he goes to school?

It's in manner such as this one that make it clear the point of SPENT is not to accurately simulate the experience of a low income individual, but rather to provide fun facts that stand out to the player. Now, I know I'm not saying anything extraordinary here, and most likely a lot of you noticed this while playing the game as well, but I just find it interesting to talk about the intended purposes of a game like this. Rather than making a sheet of information and facts that provide insight on the harsh realities of many Americans, they producers realized fun facts aren't always very fun. Instead, they integrated them into a game. Games are fun right? Almost every decision you make in the game warrants a result, and each of those results are based on a real statistic or obstacle that someone may face in the actual scenario. The combination allows for fun facts to be delivered through an interactive experience, which, I know personally, is more effective on me. In a weird way these facts are delivered as consequences, explanations, or even almost like rewards for the decisions you must make in the game. The result makes them hit the player harder, it simulates a feeling of being able to relate to the people who are actually struggling to make it by, even though the two experiences are truly incomparable.

Because the game is constantly trying to get you to this next "fact," it goes easy on the player. The idea is to keep the game flowing, hoping that the accumulation of information will affect the player perhaps emotionally. This process meets it's abrupt end at the end of the in-game month, where the producer of the game tells the player to make donations. Had the player been beaten down by the game, maybe they wouldn't be as ambivalent towards this ending message, or perhaps given up and never reached it at all.