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I have experience working for a year in a homeless shelter. I think that there is a “papers please” or “a dark room” style game that you could make that would s
by zwkrt 4y ago
I have experience working for a year in a homeless shelter. I think that there is a “papers please” or “a dark room” style game that you could make that would simulate what it is like to try to exist in homelessness.
You have very few resources, many of which are provided by the shelter but only intermittently. You should expect your things to be stolen from you if you are around other homeless people (and to not be above stealing yourself), but going it alone has its own challenges. You probably have to juggle going to 3 to 4 different shelters and various resource locations every week and sometimes two or three in one day. You never have enough food you never have enough water; there’s never a place to go to the bathroom. You can’t show up to shelter locations if you’re on drugs, but drugs will definitely be a part of your life as there’s something that you can trade and sell for money. On a day when you don’t have enough resources at the very least maybe you could take drugs to ease the pain of not having eaten for a day or so, but of course this will exacerbate your overall situation.
- netaustin 4y agoI played a version of this on Zoom as part of a Columbia University program [1] designed to simulate the conditions of re-entry from prison, which have considerable structural similarities to poverty and homelessness. The Zoom game is based on one played in person with "stations" representing different institutions and "tokens" representing stuff like money, birth certificates, ID cards, etc. Your hypothetical scenario is quite a lot like the mechanics of this game. I'm working on building a single-player software version of it because the live simulation is rather difficult to stage! [1] https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/reap https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/r...
- kderbyma 4y agothis sounds like it could be really good if done in a mix of a simulator alongside a story like GTA where you are trying to get back on your feet