Ask HN: 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?
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 204 ms ] threadThe van life community is pretty unique because van dwellers are oftentimes adventure seekers; the state of drifting is sometimes by choice. Though the lifestyle brings challenges regardless, like parking restrictions, space limitations, loneliness, high maintenance cost, etc. And most of all, vanlife is still outside of conventions and one can be judged for it. I’d love to explore these dynamics thru a game.
P.S. Nomadland has been one of my favorite films. The book is just as good. There are millions who try to find peace on their own terms.
For example, many government aid programs are (intentionally) obscure. Signing up for food stamps is so complicated, there's a charity that just helps people do it (https://www.mrelief.com). And there are plenty more strategies that help people, like for making cheap nutritious food. Any of these can be taught.
(A common misconception is that by avoiding spending, one can escape poverty, but this is not the case, because poverty is a lack of income.)
In poverty there is neither reason nor energy to waste beyond a conceivably actionable point. Learning to overcome that horizon is critical and I think it becomes more difficult the older we get.
It's basically one of those survival horror games where you have to build a base with whatever stuff you find around to not die in winter. It seems like the people who played this game more than me were motivated to finish it because it's actually a pretty damn hard game.
If you want to know the secret of how to win though here it is: It rains a lot in this game and if you get wet you become stinky so things get hard, but there's a few places to beg for change where it's dry. Try the exit to the train station and you will make thousands. It's hella menial but you just make way more money doing that than working the crappy in-game jobs on offer.
I used to work in a homeless shelter where the fine gentlemen in there would joke about how people were stupid enough to give them money all the time. It's crazy how much money you can make on forgoing all sense of humility and exploiting people's sympathy in public. Addictive street drugs aren't exactly cheap.
Can relate
According to benefits.gov you would qualify for medicaid on $1,441/month gross (the wage of the job I selected)
So, yeah. Lots of safety nets, all of which require you to live in extreme poverty to qualify for, and which still don't equate to a reasonable standard of living.
Take rent vouchers: only some people who "qualify" actually receive vouchers because there is a cap on the total number the government gives out. Or the EITC: to get the full benefit your income has to land in a narrow band. Or SNAP: all sorts of weird restrictions, and tons of people who are eligible but who don't know to sign up
But SSI benefits count SNAP as income and there is a dollar-for-dollar downward adjustment for every increase in SNAP.
So if you have SNAP, your SSI benefits will _decrease_ with an _increase_ in cost-of-living!
(Am I here to answer stupid questions...)
It's not actually "large" in the sense of total spending relative to other counties.
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.
[1] https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/r...
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.
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.
A better poverty simulator is, maybe, go ahead and keep your high level of consumption, but cancel all your insurance policies for a year. Including car insurance. That'll have a chance at provoking some poverty-like stress levels.
I'm not sure it's very realistic though because begging nets very little money and negative morale in the game, yet I think panhandlers can actually make quite a bit in real life in high traffic areas.
https://jobsimulatorgame.com/
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.
With the focus of the game on poverty, there could be opportunities for small theft that has an "odds of being caught" attached. And of course with that comes the odds of having to pay a fine, which significantly cuts into your savings (if you have any). And with some odds of being jailed, that's a number of months with no income to pay rent at all, which probably means game over, if your goal is to avoid ending up on the streets or in a shelter.
The incentives are similar to real life.
Combine that with Depression Quest's narrative mechanism of graying out choices that aren't available to you (eg. applied to actions precluded by a deficit in impulse control, a common side effect of lead poisoning), and that could be very effective, especially if the player character is a child or adolescent which constrains the available degrees of freedom a bit more to something sane and tractable (eg. a kid might steal a stereo from a car, but it would be okay in that context not to have carjacking be an option).