Week 1: Entering the Spiral

The majority of our first week on the project was spent figuring out where the current, physical version of the game stands, and how we can bring the best possible version of it into the digital space.

Before we get too far into those specifics, let’s first acknowledge that this is a new project at the ETC, and thus requires some introduction. The Poverty Spiral is a board game developed by Dana Gold, a teacher who realized her students had a lack of understanding of how hard it truly was to live in poverty and to escape that condition. Drawing from her own experience growing up in the condition of poverty, she created The Poverty Spiral, a board game built to help people understand better what it was like to live in the condition of poverty. The game has players take on the role of one of six people living in poverty with their own struggles. The players go through a series of situation cards, which contain some issue (all of which are true stories) and two choices of how to react to it. Some situations have a right answer, and some force the player to discern the lesser of two evils. Many require decisions between earning money and maintaining relationships with friends and/or family. Others require deciding between saving money in the long term or the short term, or deciding between keeping money necessary for survival and obeying the law. Depending on each player’s response to the situations, they either move deeper into the spiral of poverty or move further out of it, towards the precious, albeit temporary, stability space. Our job this spring is to transform this game from the physical space to a digital platform, so as to increase its reach and efficacy.

We met our client, the aforementioned Dana Gold, and played The Poverty Spiral with her for the first time. We were impressed with how well the feeling of frustration was communicated to the players, accurately representing the great weight behind the decisions that people in the condition of poverty have to make, and how seemingly impossible it is to truly leave the spiral of poverty and enter the world of financial stability. The game’s main purpose is to invoke empathy in the players, and the game currently delivers on that front. Our main complaint with the game is that there is untapped potential for emotional impact in the times when players do choose in-game strategy over being a good friend or family member, since there is no representation of your friends and family in game; for example, if you choose to let your sister’s kids enter the foster system rather than take care of them yourself, you never see the suffering that your decision caused. Improving on that emotional impact is one of our key focuses of design going forward.

One other area of improvement we saw in The Poverty Spiral was the potential for interaction between players, since it was very rare for one player’s actions to affect another’s. The amount and nature of player to player interaction is something we definitely want to tackle, even if the answer of how best to do that could be any number of potential solutions we have.

At this point, most of our work revolves around research, specifically research on what it’s like to live in the condition of poverty, how best to create an engaging transformational game, and how best to pack the players’ decisions with emotional impact. The former two areas are widely covered by various authors and academics, particularly Matthew Desmond, David Eggers, Valentino Achak Deng, Jonathan Kozol, Jacob Riis, Mary Jordan, and Kevin Sullivan, who have all written about different sectors in poverty, including refugees, healthcare, homelessness, tenement living, and housing, thus helping us to reflect the diverse cast of characters that players may embody in The Poverty Spiral. We’re also looking at Sabrina Culyba’s Transformational Framework, a tried and true guide for how to create games that change the players in a desired way.

As for researching emotional impact in the decisions players make, we’re studying two games that have famously done that very well on that front: This War of Mine and Frostpunk. This War of Mine functions in a very similar way to The Poverty Spiral, in that the game is all about making decisions as a character with very limited resources, even if the player takes the role of a civilian in war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina, rather than an American in poverty. This War of Mine is famous for making players feel absolutely awful if they choose strategic choices over helping friends and family, which we absolutely want to learn from and emulate in The Poverty Spiral. Frostpunk also involves making decisions with heavy weight behind them, as players take the role of the captain of a large group of people who fled London due to extreme blizzards and were forced to found a new city in a frozen wasteland. Both games give us a lot to learn, but not all of us can access them just yet. In the meantime, free games like Spent, Cart Life, and Third World Farmer also revolve around trying to escape poverty. However, in playing them, we felt they also lacked the emotional weight that we hope to give The Poverty Spiral, since the player is a step removed from the NPCs that the player is aiming to help.

The main decision that the team made this week was the new platform for The Poverty Spiral: mobile devices. We wanted to make the game as accessible to the masses as possible, which meant that AR, VR, and gaming-specific consoles were out of the picture. This narrowed it down to PC/Mac or mobile devices. Dana told us that one of her dream features for the digital version of The Poverty Spiral included notifications about real-world current events that would affect the characters in the game. These notifications would likely either take the form of emails for PC/Mac or push notifications for mobile devices. Since we thought push notifications were less annoying than emails, we decided mobile was the better option. Also, one member of the team, who grew up surrounded by poverty, pointed out that it was more common for people in poverty to have a mobile device but no computer at home than the other way around, thus strengthening the argument for mobile devices as opposed to PC/Mac.

Going forward, we’ll continue to do more research in the same areas we have been, decide whether we want a 2D or 3D art style, and figure out which features of the current version of The Poverty Spiral are the most important to our client while transforming the game into the mobile version. The game has a lot of potential, and we’re excited to see how we can make the game improve in the coming months.