Ayiti: The Cost of Life

Cost Of Life is one of the best political web games released in 2006, right up there with The McGame and the comic genuis of Airport Security. Unlike most games with a political message, like September 12th, or 3rd World Farmer, CoL has a strategy that works buried in a heap of faulty (and revealingly so) tactical blunders. This is most telling in the balance of the game's stochastic elements, where health risks can be marginalized and hurricane disasters are actually quite rare, unlike 3rd World Farmer's frustratingly even spread that ensured you'd lose everything every few turns.

Here's a strategy guide diverted from fanboy tradition to become incisive analysis:

If you live poor everyone gets sick quickly, preventing them from working and incurring health costs to get well, which effectively spirals the family into a negative feedback loop that kills everyone. You need to keep the standard of living at the "decent" level in order to keep the health profile going, but that alone isn't enough. If you help build up the local community center (run by Unicef, which also had a hand in producing the game) you'll get health and educational benefits more frequently. It's not immediately obvious in the game, but volunteering is often preferable to going to school: both increase your education level, through neither earn you money (and school sometimes costs you money). So volunteering is good. Having at least one educated family member able to work as a secretary (for an NGO office, hmmm, fingerprints of the producers?) is the mid-game breakthrough that lets you live "good" (where health doesn't deteriorate on a seasonal basis; mmmmm, delicious--middle-class stasis). The trick is getting the wife up to education level four before the negative feedback loop pulls you under the tide.

It took me about six or seven plays to hone in on the winning strategy that lets you break into middle-class stability: self-education. Spending the fifty "goul" (money in the game) every season on books will earn the whole family educational points much more cost effectively than schooling (since they can also work), so you only need to take Marie to vocational school a handful of times. That's what it boils down to: reading on your own time because you want to is the cheapest and most effective way to better your earning prospects. The political message seems to be then: where there's a will and a library, there is a way. A counter-message seems to be: where there's an NGO proliferating the availability of libraries, people are more likely to have the will to better themselves because the means to do so are available. The first message is implied from the game's material constraints (books, cost economy) and seems to be decidedly conservative (get a job! read a book! American Pie discourages loveless sex!). The second message comes from the game's formal constraints (the progression of an explicit reward cycle deriving from macro-scale mechanics) and is seemingly quite leftist (NGOs are the answer, hurrah!). The beauty of the play's resonance, of the messages only games can imply, comes in the gap between these constraints, and orthogonally, from the gap between the game's representations and its simulated mechanics of economy and randomized interdiction. In that quiet space, you are not a pawn in someone else's agenda, but a family, and holy shit, that's art, I reckon.

It's also kind of fun as you figure out how to get ahead, if that means anything to you. I'm not sure which was more compelling, the later feelings of success as I worked that dominant strategy, or the early feelings of anguished sympathy as these people helplessly struggled with no way out.