Debt Ski is a persuasive game about managing finances. The player controls a cute piggy bank on a jet ski (using the arrow keys to speed up and the space bar to jump) trying to pay for the necessities of life, while collecting more money than you spend and being happy. The player is also able to pay off their debt and might occasionally run into a tsumani which causes you to spend more money. The game can be played at a website called: indebted.
At first glance of the game, it seems like the point the game is trying to make is to save more than you spend. According to the rules, if you have too much debt the game will end, but there is no limit to the amount of savings you can have. The interest rates for the credit only go up when you fail to meet a payment, but the savings interest rates seem to go up steadily. If you are too busy trying to catch coins with your pig to pay attention to the fine print, then it is clear that savings are good and credit is bad by the colors. Your savings show up in a green box, while your credit shows up in a red box.
However, as I continued to play the game, I felt that the real lesson the game was trying to teach was if you fail to buy the things you need (called necessities during gameplay), then you will die. This is the reason that I have named this post the (un)impossible game. Although the rules of the game talk of victory conditions, no matter how hard I played, I could not purchase all of my necessities and the game would end. Unlike many other games, the player only has one life instead of three. You could go into debt and still play the next level, but if you failed to purchase the necessities then the game ends. I think that the game is telling me that if I don't buy food, I will starve and if I don't pay for electricity then I will freeze to death.
During gameplay, it is much easier to buy extra things like ice cream, airplane rides, and laptops than it is to buy the necessities. On the upper levels, you have to go out of your way to purchase the necessities, but the extras are always coming down and are often unavoidable. The game is making a statement, that although it is often much easier to buy things that are bright and colorful, you shouldn't purchase them until after you have bought the things that you need.
Debt Ski is a very entertaining, albeit frustrating game that teaches lessons about wants and needs in a procedural way.
1.) I like your translation of in-game-processes to the real world. In one instance you broken down this linkage so simplistically, it was almost humorous (“I think the game I telling me that if I don’t buy food, I will starve and if I don’t pay for electricity then I will freeze to death.”) Whether or not you intended this to be comical, I am unsure, but it made me laugh.
ReplyDelete2.) There is a lot of grammatical confusion throughout your post. For example, in the second sentence you switch the subject of your sentence from “the player” and begin to use the second person “you”. Bouncing back and forth like this adds confusion and interrupts an otherwise fluid post.
My other suggestion is to be more explicit when describing the actions user can take. You state that one of the objective of play is to “[be] happy”, but do not describe how players are permitted to achieve this goal. I felt like I had to fill in a lot of gaps.
3.) Do you think that a game designer can have only one objective/message in their game? You describe two possible arguments/process the designer may be trying to illustrate in such a way that makes me think you believe they must be mutually exclusive.