I sometimes think that people involved in "games for change" are completely fucking insane. Debt Ski is a case in point. Funded by the Peter C. Peterson Foundation, a conservative non-profit with a particular bug about the federal deficit, Debt Ski is supposed to teach "young folks" (thus launched together with MTVu) the merits of fiscal responsibility.
Here's how! It's a sidescroller! You're a little piggy bank on a jet ski! Collect coins, avoid "debt tsunamis", and collect just enough "necessity" powerups to sustain your lifestyle and no more, or you lose money! Also, consumer goods float down from the sky on parachutes -- getting them increases your "happiness," but costs you money.
Consumer goods increase my happiness? Oh really?
So let's take this from the perspective of a gamer. Okay, platformer, coins good, lifestyle shit good only until I hit my limit, avoid everything else, unless you want to go for the optional "happiness" score. Only, you know, it's kind of dull -- not challenging, indifferent level design, nothing really interesting here.
But it teaches you fiscal responsibility!
Oh really?
Celebrity Calamity
You may want to take a look at Celebrity Calamity, another game designed to teach personal finance. Players become personal assistants to celebrities and must help them manage their finances.
I think it's much better than the trippy jet-skiing pig, but I'll admit a certain bias because I work with the designers of Celebrity Calamity.
Infamously transparent. All
Infamously transparent.
All the elements point to a satire, sure it pretends to be "educational" in the old sense?
I felt rather humilliated than educated by this thing!
Consistency
There is at least a certain consistency in the conservative position here of understanding the game as completely literal. If GTA or Doom cause you to go out into the world and kill people, then by the same logic playing this game will ensure fiscal responsibility. And increase water-skiing accidents.
Hurray for capitalism !
Manufactured Goods make me happy !
Oh but wait, how do poor people do ?
LOL
@hauntology, LOL - Well expressed.
Sheesh
So back in December and January I tried my hand at this contest, first I did a design where you´re like a young statue of liberty, "America" in the third person, and your dad is like Dick Cheney and encouraging you to go make a bunch of money and you´ve got the same trade-offs between cost and satisfaction as you go through the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and finally the collapse in the 00s. My math was a bit more naunced though, there was a weighting variable where the higher the number, basically, the more like Greg Costikyan you were relative to say, Paris Hilton, it made happiness burn less significant. Then when my programming partner flaked out, I talked about it with Daniel Benmergui and we were going to do something like Moon but with a family in debt, where you have different possible futures and you´re changing your dreams in order to achieve the best future rather than the other way around. He flaked out in the last two hours and did another version (unreleased) of Today I Die instead, which was actually pretty cool. After they informed us the unplayable entry was not selected, heh, I was asked if I wouldn´t mind being involved in some way and I told them I´ve got a pretty decent grasp of game design in the context of finance, so I´d be happy to consult. That was the last I heard from them.
So it´s quite amusing to me that they ended up going with this swine flu ridden broken metaphor. The celebrity game has a similar skinning problem, with the guy running around to catch money, trying to avoid unnessecary purchases. What does the time involved in the money falling mean? What about the instances where you´d have to catch an extraneous item to get the cash? Useless. You can´t just borrow a genre and expect procedural rhetoric to come up.
One more thing, Peter G. Peterson´s Blackrock is now one of the most illumanti-ish firms in the world, they´ve stepped up from private equity and now are rocking one of the premier quantitative hedge funds as well as financing some of the privelidged government deals, I´m pretty sure they´ve got their hands in the piggy bank with the GM bankruptcy. So the dissonance between his foundation trying to teach fiscal conservatism and his for-profit business actively reaping the benefits of newly created money billed to the mythical "taxpayer" is quite interesting. I wouldn´t be surprised if he has ties to black ops and international drug money flows like AIG´s Hank Greenberg.
Reminds me of...
One of my students once pointed me to this personal finance game for "tweens": http://tweens.feedthepig.org/tweens/
In this game, you have to purchase all of your necessities and a certain number of luxury items, but if you shop around you can get the same item for cheaper (so there is clearly supposed to be a sense of time-for-money tradeoffs).
How is it implemented? Through whack-a-mole mechanics. So it ends up being more of a can-you-click-and-react-fast game than anything else, which bears about as much resemblance to real-world financial decisions as a side-scrolling platformer.
I think I've seen many "personal finance" games that suck. I'm having a hard time thinking of any that are actually good. This is really strange to me that it gets screwed up so easily; games are made of systems, personal finance has all kinds of very interesting systems, so it SHOULD be easy to make a compelling game based on the tradeoffs of time, money, debt, savings, and so on. Why is it so hard in practice?
It´s about the money Dick!
"Why is it so hard in practice?"
I think it has to do with the incumbent biases of how these projects are funded, wouldn´t that be ironic?
The subject line is a quote from "The Assasination of Richard Nixon", not an insult against you.