Are there any good poverty simulator games?
I'm curious about a game genre that seems really niche. A poverty or low-income simulator game that might put people in the shoes of such folks, particularly showing the struggles of low-income people in the USA without much of a safety net.
There is SPENT (https://playspent.org/html/). It's a linear, choose your own adventure story, but not really a game, IMHO.
I've seen a couple apps on Google Play but they have under 100 downloads, and focus more on stock trading.
Is this a niche worth exploring? Would it be possible to make a game that is both entertaining and educational about the real challenges these people face, at the same time?
I have experience working for a year in a homeless shelter. I think that there is a “papers please” or “a dark room” style game that you could make that would simulate what it is like to try to exist in homelessness.
You have very few resources, many of which are provided by the shelter but only intermittently. You should expect your things to be stolen from you if you are around other homeless people (and to not be above stealing yourself), but going it alone has its own challenges. You probably have to juggle going to 3 to 4 different shelters and various resource locations every week and sometimes two or three in one day. You never have enough food you never have enough water; there’s never a place to go to the bathroom. You can’t show up to shelter locations if you’re on drugs, but drugs will definitely be a part of your life as there’s something that you can trade and sell for money. On a day when you don’t have enough resources at the very least maybe you could take drugs to ease the pain of not having eaten for a day or so, but of course this will exacerbate your overall situation.
I think if you succeeded in making a game that successfully simulated the experience of poverty, it would be extremely unfun to play.
There is a popular misconception that poverty amounts to having your bank balance reset to zero. “Damn, guess I’ll have to earn it all back”. But what you can’t reset or simulate is the human capital embodied within you that got you to this point. Your lifetime of education, your experience of problem solving, your strong network of contacts, your history of good decision-making. You also can’t ignore the physical comfort that you, the player, would be in as you play the game. With all of that, you very likely could just earn it all back.
That’s not what poverty is about.
Most important to keep in mind the caution from Pulp's "Common People", which isn't even about the sort of poverty you're describing but just the ordinary lives of people who wouldn't consider themselves "poor" at all.
But still you'll never get it right /
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night /
Watching roaches climb the wall /
If you called your dad he could stop it all
The thing we can't simulate about poverty is that it isn't just a game, that when you're sick and tired of it and feel you've learned what it has to teach you, you can't just exit and not be poor any more.
I've been working on some free/libre open source software for 22 years designed to help people survive poverty and related conditions, such as homelessness, disability, illness, relationship abuse, emergencies, etc. It's called the Free Life Planner (FLP). The goal of FLP is to help people get on top of every security, such as food, water, financial, emotional, cyberphysical, etc etc. Its website is here: https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner I really need to rewrite the introduction to the FLP GitHub page since it doesn't explain the concept well enough, although the following use case does explain it more: https://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/homeless-story.html If anyone is interested in collaborating that would be fantastic, there's already a Vagrant image of FLP (but it's heavily redacted and out of date) available here: https://app.vagrantup.com/aindilis We're also working on finishing the installer for both FLP and the middleware that it runs on top of, called FRDCSA ( https://frdcsa.org ). The installer for FRDCSA when fixed up will be available here: https://github.com/aindilis/frdcsa-installer I would love to see a free/libre open source video game that used the tech involved.
"CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience" is one of the best games that gives you an immersive experience and challenge of an everyday homeless person.
IIUC, for better realism, you can't stop playing, you can't get new games, games you had before disappear, things outside the desperation game disappear, every week causes lasting damage to your console/PC health, government help with its Kafkaesque procedures stresses and humiliates you, neighborhood thugs randomly break down your door and use a hammer to hit your hands gripping the controller, but you still can't stop playing, because your only character is permadeath.
It's a long time since I played it but Real Lives (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives) might meet your criteria. You start as a child with some random traits somewhere in the world and try to advance your life. Some starts are a lot harder than others.
This War of Mine has some aspects of a poverty simulator, albeit in a war zone. Papers, Please requires you to allocate your measly pay at the end of the day, somewhat encouraging breaking the job rules for kickbacks.
"Diary of a spaceport janitor" may not be a poverty sim, and looks from the color choices alone far from one, but it does capture a certain mood; a common feeling produced by the 'poverty wage in a bustling hub of wealth' life.
Being a game, it's also an interesting take on exploring NPCs as a subject in games in a rather humanizing way, rarely do games treat them as having interior lives at all, or why far-out space fantasy still reproduces menial labor of our day without question.
It is probably a genre worth exploring. An interactive fiction game that explored a similar area is Depression Quest:
http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html
A hypothetical "Poverty Quest" (or perhaps "Precarity Quest") would have additional challenges, though, such as avoiding becoming Grand Theft Auto without glossing over the fact that criminality is sometimes the only seemingly viable career path, not to mention intersectional issues like race and class, food deserts and swamps, elevated toxic exposure (including lead) in low income neighborhoods, etc.
The one I think of immediately is CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience. Saw it in Games for Change Awards nominees and it has stuck with me to this day. 2D side scroller. Well worth your time. https://www.delveinteractive.com/change
Definitely a topic which could really benefit from further exploration through games!
I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Sims. Starting a regular game without any cheats sure felt like being poor to me.
Browsing through the catalogue of stuff for your house and all you can afford is the most basic version.
I'm sure this can be improved upon with mods. Afaik they already have apartments.
Check out "Hobo: Tough Life", it's at the extreme end of the spectrum, where you have to beg and steal in the beginning.
>The Affordable Care Act requires you get health insurance. The good news? Your child is covered by the state. The bad? You aren’t.
According to benefits.gov you would qualify for medicaid on $1,441/month gross (the wage of the job I selected)
You start in poverty and can work your way out, but you can also get trapped. It certainly gives you the feeling of the grind: eating only the cheapest food, earning barely enough, having no time after work.
> Would it be possible to make a game that is both entertaining and educational about the real challenges these people face, at the same time?
Sure, just play Monopoly with a handicap against people who are really good at it and who collude against you. Not many folks would find that fun though!
Losing while playing Monopoly
Other than that, nothing really comes to mind, and honestly nothing could replace the constant stress of not being able to pay rent, food and utilities at the end of the month, knowing you can't and still be unable to do anything to fix it other than taking a payday loan which you also know won't be able to pay, bonus stress points if you have got kids
With the last round of "empathy games" (early 2010's stuff like Cart Life or Depression Quest, all of which got some play in academic game studies) one of the major objections that came up was that the player of such games may not carry this forward into any positive action their lives, but rather see themselves like the viewer of a TV sitcom, aggressively making things worse for their character for the sake of being a troll: "sucks to be poor, lol".
If there's a correct way to produce an empathy response, it appears to be Undertale's model, in which the player spends most of the game thinking that they are beating the game by killing monsters and ignoring the signs that they actually made an ethical choice until it's too late, further hammered in by an extra layer of permanence in the game's save system taunting them for what they did.
The downside is that this seems to mostly be a shame response, not a guilt response. Much of the resulting fandom casually overlooked the darker elements of the characters you're sparing, which are mostly revealed in postgame content. That is, the ethical behaviors are produced by manufacturing an attachment to the fictional universe, not by developing the player's philosophy of action.
If you want to take on this type of game, addressing the player attachments is priority one. Otherwise they disengage with the content and aim just to break the game systems instead.
That's a very personal take but I don't think this genre of game would be beneficial or even appropriate. I can see it in other comments with how people who play these types of games react, it doesn't really "educate people about the challenges these people face", quite the opposite, it gamifies real struggles and makes it look like a lifestyle choice rather than what it really is: a bad situation people find themselves in and that puts their life in danger especially in some countries.
The result of that is looking down on poor people as "they just aren't good at the game" except it's their life at play, not a high score or virtual currency. People who enjoy "janitor simulators" would very likely not enjoy having to scrub toilets all day long for minimum wage, people who enjoy bus driving simulators would very likely not enjoy having to deal with grumpy and sometimes violent passengers in real life, but they don't realize that, they look at the game and think "it's not so bad it's even fun I could totally do that for real". I don't think we need people to start thinking "being poor is kinda fun lol it's just about management".
A game that accurately portrays poverty would not be fun to play, and nobody would be playing it, because there's no end game and no win for a lot of people in poverty and many simply stay in that situation their whole life. Otherwise, just play GTA, that's as fun as it gets for a "start poor become billionaire" game.
I think it is a niche worth exploring. I have long thought of a vanlife game which would highlight homelessness. If anyone wants to work together on such a project just holler.
Isn't Papers Please built on this concept? Maybe not poverty but war/survival related is This War of Mine
Back in 2006 there was a flash game called
Ayiti: The cost of life
Don't know if it is still around but it was about a very poor family in Haiti
It wouldn't be fun. Grind, grind, grind, never get anywhere. Work twice as hard for half the reward, then get fucked over in every other aspect of life. Games are about escapism, a chance to win at something, not experiencing bleak and abject failure for reasons outside of your control.
Something like games these by Jane McGonigal
https://janemcgonigal.com/play-me/
> I make alternate reality games: games that are designed to improve real lives or solve real problems. I’ve been making ARGs since 2001 — and you can watch trailers for a dozen of my favorite ARGs below.
> Many of my games challenge players to tackle real-world problems at a planetary-scale: hunger, poverty, climate change, or global peace, for example (see: EVOKE, World Without Oil, Superstruct)
So disco Elysium is many things. Playing it was the first time I was extremely anxious about paying rent. One of the main ways you make money is collecting broken bottles.
This War of Mine opened my eyes to the horror of civil wars on civilian populations, with events much like Mariupol is likely experiencing today.
Theft, depression, drugs, violence, weather and exposure, shelter building, scavenging, starving, and watching your friends die... It was something I couldn't put down for a while and I think about it all the time.
You might try something like that.
Banished does a good job at simulating a resource strained community where bad choices can have terrible consequences in the short term.
I once wrote a game-like sim about "how to get rich" (which I named American Barons.) Java, desktop game, just to scratch an itch. and yes the player/PC does start out dirt poor.
closest thing I've seen to what you're asking about. I never released it to the public but I might have its code sitting on some backup disk somewhere.
I would like for there to be a game where you started with a budget of $X, and the goal is to maximize its effectiveness at improving the lives of the ultra low income people in your city.
Effective altruism on micro scales. And using ethical and legal means only, obviously, since the overarching goal is to be positive-sum.
Haven't played it by myself, but Pathologic II could be described as a poverty simulator. The game truly makes you miserable and puts hard choices on you. Do you steal food to not starve, when your reputation is sort of key to going ahead?
There is even inflation in there. And a plague.
Just save a bit of money and then quit your job and see what happens when you stop paying your bills. The fact that you're that far removed from actual poverty is both highly encouraging and disgusting at some level.
Night Call is in the ballpark, at least. You play as a taxi driver, budgeting your taxi trips, passengers, gas money, money for other things (ie newspapers or clues) to help solve a whodunnit mystery.
Agricola
Not the same setting you described but its a frustrating one, it pretends to be a competitive game pitting the plays against each other but the mechanics for mere survival seem to override that.
The early game in The Sims is kind of like a poverty simulator, but eventually it gets a lot easier.
I assume that some mods and things of that nature can make the game more difficult.
There is a game you can play in real life where you withdraw a certain amount of cash (i.e. a minimum wage paycheck after taxes removed) and then try to survive on that for two weeks, only using cash, and subtracting any expenses for subscriptions and rent you use during the two weeks.
To make things more accurate, you could choose to modify your rent expense to reflect the kind of home you’d actually be living in.
If you want to play hard mode, you could also increase the difficulty by simulating illegal immigrant status and get paid even less, maybe half of minimum wage. Almost certainly you will have to choose a cheaper home to survive.
My brother networked his friend playing a game called something along the lines of “hobo simulator” I’m sure it’s much more of a comical than serious game though.
Flip the DB board main switch at home.
100% real poverty.
If you have a vr headset, check out “Becoming Homeless” by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
It could be most beneficial to people currently in poverty, to try out strategies for escaping it.
Start SIMS but with 0$ and try to escape poverty trap
It’s a board game called “Monopoly”.
the genre should be RPG grind with hardcore resource management and psychological horror
That would be damn cool game!
just you wait till someone makes east europe simulator
yes, but they are very expensive.
Whichever one you choose, be sure to select the one that gives you the experience of waiting on tables packed with rich, white, fat blobs of flesh and decadence opining on what it may be like to be the server, an ethnic minority, sixty years of age and five years away from retirement, still hauling sacks of ice out back to raise enough cash to make sure they can fill their rice cooker with enough food to make dinner for three tonight.
This will ensure the most authentic experience, as opposed to some cheap simulation whites use to amuse themselves and vicariously live the life of a human who's actually had to fight for their lot.
Oh, right, this is Hacker News. None of you actually give a father flying fuck. It's more important to leave a digital paper trail merely suggesting that you do.