3 ms·
It is probably a genre worth exploring. An interactive fiction game that explored a similar area is Depression Quest: http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.ht
by webmaven 4y ago
It is probably a genre worth exploring. An interactive fiction game that explored a similar area is Depression Quest:
http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html
A hypothetical "Poverty Quest" (or perhaps "Precarity Quest") would have additional challenges, though, such as avoiding becoming Grand Theft Auto without glossing over the fact that criminality is sometimes the only seemingly viable career path, not to mention intersectional issues like race and class, food deserts and swamps, elevated toxic exposure (including lead) in low income neighborhoods, etc.
- ksaj 4y agoI also thought of the GTA gameplay. With the focus of the game on poverty, there could be opportunities for small theft that has an "odds of being caught" attached. And of course with that comes the odds of having to pay a fine, which significantly cuts into your savings (if you have any). And with some odds of being jailed, that's a number of months with no income to pay rent at all, which probably means game over, if your goal is to avoid ending up on the streets or in a shelter. The incentives are similar to real life.
- webmaven 4y agoSure. Combine that with Depression Quest's narrative mechanism of graying out choices that aren't available to you (eg. applied to actions precluded by a deficit in impulse control, a common side effect of lead poisoning), and that could be very effective, especially if the player character is a child or adolescent which constrains the available degrees of freedom a bit more to something sane and tractable (eg. a kid might steal a stereo from a car, but it would be okay in that context not to have carjacking be an option).