I used to give away lots of money to homeless people, at one GDC I gave away like a quarter of my travel budget to various hobos, in $20 denominations, because they asked and it was like a cool tourism thing for me. Since living in a filthy, cosmopolitan megalopolis for the past year I´ve become more jaded, at first it was a joy to hand out torn ten peso bills to various street performers on Calle Florida, and to children juggling in the avenidas, but overtime its become another social tension, another point of mental stress in the great control grid of a city. So now we´ve got an "art game" in the sense that its main mechanic involves something social, you play the eponymous beggar who, after getting thrown out of the elite castle, has to go about soliciting aid to survive.
The main mechanic involves pushing the down arrow key to project a radial beam of some kind of vibe. The yellow vibe is something along the lines of "una mondeda, por favor!" or it´s English cousin "got any change?" Other vibes can be unlocked through items which cost money, demonstrating that you can only be free of money anxiety if you already got some. You fade away if you get hungry, which has a double metaphor of your metabolism and also the feeling one has as they starve of being a ghost, of not mattering in the socio-economic system. You don´t want to overdo your begging or people will get hostile and cops hassle you as they are wont to do.
Like The Majesty of Colors or I Wish I Were the Moon, the game´s formal constraints fold it out like an oragami tree with a finite set of endings you can poke around for, each with its own archetypal energy and poetic posture. One of them takes the math dynamic of small numbers ticked up and down linearly and throws it into an exponential bask in big-numbered wealth as you gallivant around, feared but friendless, and that was the most interesting one for me. Simple as it is, it is a good means to meditate on what real value is and how we deal with fear and alienation created by differences in paper units of account. I´m begging for enlightenment but all I get is cheap GMO food and scratchware entertainments.
