Budget Hero is a game about the US Federal budget. In the game, you raise and lower the budget by cutting or funding particular programs (in the form of cards), and your aim is to reach a budget that matches your values. For instance, if you tell it that you value education, and spend a lot of money on education, you're self-consistent enough to get the education badge.
It's not a bad game, but it is very simplistic. I know the budget is too complex for any game, but I'd have liked to see more options. You can't drastically change the budget in any significant way. You can make tweaks and minor changes, but no major ones. Which I suppose is realistic, even for a president, but what if I don't want to just shave off 10% of the military budget, what if I want to cut it in half? What if I don't want to just cut off a few education programs, what if I want to abolish education spending entirely, and leave it entirely up to the individual states? What if I don't want to just slightly increase the budget for NASA, what if I want to increase it by a thousand times? What if I want to create new programs that don't exist there (such as a "Manhattan Project" to cure cancer)? What if you want to abolish the CIA? And so on. It's not very flexible, it doesn't let me do anything really interesting. And if a game doesn't let you do anything interesting, what's the point? The point seemed to be to teach people how the budget works, and how much money goes where, rather than to make a game that gives you real freedom to play around with it.
As far as the informative goal is concerned, I can see its value. Looking at the game you can see immediately where the money that government collects goes, represented by the height of each building. You can't actually see what all the money is used for however (which I would have preferred). For instance, money spent on housing was about $300 billion, and the cards related to cutting or adding programs in that area only allowed you to increase it or decrease it by two dozen billion at most, making the player wonder where exactly the rest of that money was going. So although it gives the player a general impression of where the budget goes, it leaves the player with a lot of questions as well.
There are also a few counter-intuitive aspects of this game. For instance, the only way to free up enough money to do anything substantial with the budget is to increase taxes, in particular, repealing the Bush tax cuts. No amount of cutting the budget will net you as much money as that one act (nearly 3 trillion? Is that even accurate?). Another issue is that the game tells you that you have a small government even if you have extremely high taxes; it only takes actual spending into account when measuring government size. The variation in program size is also a bit odd: there are cards in the trillion range and cards in the half-billion range, which make no visible difference to anything, and which makes you wonder why options which make no conceivable difference either way was even included.
Because it's only a Flash game it's worth the small amount of your time it takes to get through it, and you can get through it rather quickly. Hopefully it'll teach people a few things about the US budget in a fun way, but it won't give you anything a quick look at the Wikipedia article on the US budget couldn't give you, which is a pity, because part of the beauty of games is being able to express ideas through their gameplay that can't be expressed as well in any other fashion.
The Budget in Depth
Actually, you can do a game that goes into the Federal budget in much more detail, and allows far more extreme options. I should know, since I designed one: it was called Reinventing America, it was funded by the Markle Foundation, and it ran (twice) for six month periods in 1995 and 1996. I will not tell you it was a good game -- decisions were made by voting, and voting sucks as a game mechanic for the same reasons it sucks in real life (as an individual, you never feel like you have much of an impact on outcomes). But we permitted extreme outcomes, and some happened (Congress Legalizes Heroin! -- really). It was an interesting exercise, though, and perhaps worth redoing, in an era when 'serious games' now get more attention.
Incidentally, there are good reasons for including smaller budget items. For one thing, many people have entirely unrealistic ideas about what things cost (e.g., foreign aid is a tiny portion of the federal budget, and yet it's a bete noir of the right). For another, some things that don't actually get a lot of money are hot-button issues for some people (e.g., the National Endowment for the Arts), and it's worth including them to give people something to talk about. Well, okay, I'm thinking more of my game, which was large-scale multiplayer; Budget Hero is single-player, and thus people don't talk, but still.
Good point on the smaller
Good point on the smaller budget items, hadn't considered that.
Democracy 2
Positech's Democracy (and Democracy 2) deal with this matter in what I thought to be an elegant and deep manner. The focus isn't primarily on monetary issues so much as policy, but the ever-rising debt is a horrible reminder that building a wonderful utopian society, or for that matter, something slightly better than widespread riots, is financially unsustainable.