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Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
41–50 of 142 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#42"CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience" is one of the best games that gives you an immersive experience and challenge of an everyday homeless person.
Yeah it's a pretty depressing and challenging game. I beat this game with all the different scenarios. If you play long enough though, you can find a pretty simple formula to win:
- Find the nearest homeless shelter that is near a job board
- Take freelance jobs, putting the bulk of your earnings in a savings account and only keeping a little cash on hand for laundry and other things (otherwise it gets stolen at the homeless shelter)
- Spend all the rest of your time at the library studying until you can get a higher paying job
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.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#43>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)
Many don't know the USA has a very large safety net. Medicaid, medicare, social security, SNAP, TANF, SSI, LIHEAP, EITC, rent vouchers, pell grants, job training programs, etc.
Who doesn't know this? The problem isn't that there's no safety net, the problem is that navigating it is a maze and there's tons of cracks for people to fall through. Many, many people don't get the help they need because of that.
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
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#44The 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!
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#45>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)
Many don't know the USA has a very large safety net. Medicaid, medicare, social security, SNAP, TANF, SSI, LIHEAP, EITC, rent vouchers, pell grants, job training programs, etc.
It has a convoluted mess of programs, often mutually exclusive, that each have separate requirements and "churn" people off their benefits regularly with complicated and recurring bureaucratic burdens.
It's not actually "large" in the sense of total spending relative to other counties.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#46"CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience" is one of the best games that gives you an immersive experience and challenge of an everyday homeless person.
This looks amazing. Thanks for sharing.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#47https://store.steampowered.com/app/632300/Hobo_Tough_Life/
$30 is surprising for a game about homelessness.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#48Most 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#49Losing 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
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea except it only benefits you if you are way below the poverty level. We need to make sure every one is benefitted so we don’t deincentivize seeking higher paying jobs just to keep basic benefits.
How do we pay for an expansion of federal benefits? The ones we have are already quite cumbersome on the federal budget.
Making the benefits universal would increase everyone's personal budgets to compensate.