oregon trail? dopewars?
Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
111–120 of 142 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#112That would be damn cool game!
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#113If you have a vr headset, check out “Becoming Homeless” by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#114It 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…
I also thought of the GTA gameplay. 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,…
Sure.
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).
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think if you succeeded in making a game that successfully simulated the experience of poverty, it would be extremely unfun to play. I don't think you're someone that plays many videogame simulations, as the whole point is making something fun that's inherently boring in real life. There are so many popular simulators for famously mind-numbing jobs: farming, janitorial services (and further niches within this incl…
While I have never understood the existence of games like Long Haul Trucker, they do exist.
I ran across a stream of a guy playing Euro Truck Simulator and it was hilarious
The host was hilarious and the commenters were all amused by how oddly therapeutic and also anxiety inducing it was
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#116Most 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 i…
Video games involve a lot of storytelling. Stories can be super powerful, and I think the world definitely has room for more games that depict and explore the experience of poverty. But that absolutely HAS to come from a place of direct experience. If you read a couple books, interview a couple people at a shelter, and then make a game - it won't be a poverty simulator. It might simulate the theoretical economics of…
Reading your comment, if OP is still around to see this, I think their simulator should be more from a 3rd person perspective following 1 or several characters who are poor, and where the player can listen to their inner voices, and/or make game choices for them and watch the characters stumble and maybe fail. Ideally the player gets attached to the characters and can feel sympathy as the hardness of poverty beats them up.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or here's an interesting fact: SNAP (food stamps) have cost-of-living adjustments. When food prices go up, SNAP benefits go 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!
If you own a couple of grand in assets you no longer qualify for SNAP. Which is crazy given that 15 million people rely on SNAP.
Seems in a lot of cases the limit is $2500! Even a very modest emergency fund is probably going to be double that...
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#118Earlier 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.
Yep. Politicians for years have made it super hard to get benefits, and now decry people not wanting to work. There's a huge gap between "eligible for all benefits" and "makes enough to offset the loss of benefits", and no clear way to cross over short of getting paid $20+ an hour. Trying to make benefits reduce proportional to income would work, but requires a lot of bookkeeping and proof (and, of course, some polit…
The problem is more that there's a whole bunch of different programs that don't make sense together. The "right" thing to do would be to combine all of them and make it so that you lose say 35¢ of benefits per extra $1 of income, so that even after tax it's still always better to earn more. Unfortunately, everyone is afraid that any attempt to overhaul the welfare system would be co-opted by those looking to gut it instead. So we're stuck with a broken system
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#119Whichever 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are there any good poverty simulator games?
#120This 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.