51–60 of 142 posts
Frostpunk is similar to this https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/323190/
Looks interesting. Seems to be more of a fantasy-dystopian "last civilization on earth" version of SimCity.
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 ment…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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's not convenient to know that when your goal is to smash capitalism.
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.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/436500/Diaries_of_a_Space...
Ayiti: The cost of life
Don't know if it is still around but it was about a very poor family in Haiti
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. I…
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.
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.