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Spent is a game that showed me the wrenching choices that people in poverty routinely encounter – many choices that Americans, such as myself, don’t realize have to be a choice. In the game, I played as a single parent and made financial decisions for a month with only $1,000 to my name. Throughout the 30 days, I had to make decisions on what I spent my money on medical care, housing, food, transportation, and more. Some decisions were simple, such as whether I wanted a $6 salad or a $1 burger. Others were more difficult, such as spending money I didn’t necessarily have in order to give my mom the medication that she needed. Regardless of the simplicity or the difficulty of these decisions, they are decisions that my family has never faced, so they were very unfamiliar to me and gave me a much greater appreciation of the things that I have in my life. I believe that Spent gave a good representation of the experience of the working poor through the presentations of real-life situations and the visualization of the bank balance and movement of money which properly allowed me to experience the economic realities that impoverished people in America face daily.
Most of us are blind and numb to the effects of poverty because we don’t have to experience it. We have all mindlessly absorbed the data and stats of poverty, but only processed it from a distance, oblivious and unaware of the real difficulties that poverty holds. With my experience in the game, there seemed to be a constant pattern of no improvement. While this isn’t necessarily completely realistic, it allowed me to realize just how lucky I am in terms of my everyday life. Throughout the 18 years of my youth, I never once experienced money issues. Meanwhile, child poverty in America is currently at 17.5% (Pressman, 2018). This game made me realize how important one’s upbringing is. Our parents have a gigantic impact on our lives, just as our grandparents had an impact on theirs. Why have I never had to choose between basic expenses? Why have I been able to choose between things such as what type of car I wanted, when there are teenagers who would dream of having any type of reliable transportation? Why did I work a job solely for extra expenses such as going to the movies and getting new clothes when there are teenagers who work to support THEIR families, having to choose between a social life and money for their basic expenses? It’s because of my upbringing. It is because my dad is a white businessman who graduated from Cornell and has enough wealth to easily support a family of six and because his dad was also a white businessman who was able to easily climb his way to the top of the company he worked for. This does not make me more deserving than the impoverished and neither does it make me morally better – I’m just lucky.
Spent emphasizes the power of upbringing by showing the struggle of being a single parent. For example, in my experience in the game, I had to decide that my child couldn’t go to a birthday party because I didn’t have enough money to provide a birthday present. My financial stability as a parent in the game and my upbringing as a child in the game are negatively impacting them. This game shows the reality and burdens of lower-class families. It has been shown that children have a higher average score on their SAT if their parents have a higher income, and the amount of time that lower-class parents have to work can greatly interfere with family relationships (Markovits, 2019). There is a pattern of how greatly one’s upbringing impacts the future generations of the family. Kids get stuck in trying to achieve upward mobility, whether that’s due to economic issues within the community, the upbringing that they experienced, or the overall sense of striving for the American Dream among the working class (Vance, 2016).
The American Dream states that ALL people, with the right amount of effort and work, can achieve what they are working towards. All they must do is work hard enough (Hernandez, Wealth Inequality in America). The American Dream isn’t as simple as it sounds, though. In fact, the American Dream is a rare phenomenon to those born in the lower class, with one out of every 100 children in the poorest fifth of households, and less than one out of 50 children in the middle fifth of households joining the top five percent (Markovits, 2019). Spent gives a good insight into how hard it is to make this progress. In my 30 days in the game, every time I took a step forward, it seemed like the next day I was taking two steps back. The game made me choose between items such as toilet paper and paper towels, fixing my own sink or getting a plumper, and deciding whether to give my mom the medicine that she needs for her health. There were simple choices and there were tough choices, but why weren’t there any beneficial choices? I believe that the reason the game did not provide any true room for improvement was to show players that social mobility is hard to come by in the lower class, which could be due to the Matthew Effect: the concept that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (Hernandez, Wealth Inequality in America). This idea is seen in many ways, including the hardships that children born into an impoverished community face. For instance, a child in a low-income family is more likely to deal with experiences of childhood trauma and therefore is more likely to get into situations such as becoming more vulnerable to the idea of doing drugs or having to drop out of high school in order to support their family (Vance, 2016). Spent provides an increased of awareness of the hardships that low-income parents face by allowing a person to experience this reality.
While the game explores the hardships of low-income working families, there is no emphasis on the differences between race and gender in terms of poverty. The aspect of further hardships that the discriminated, impoverished community goes through is not shown in Spent and does not give the player any viewpoint of what these individuals have to face. Spent utilizes finances as the biggest aspect of the game but doesn’t focus on any racial elements of poverty and financial struggles. To be blunt, in America, the chances of making it from the bottom to the top are slim if you aren’t white. To put it in perspective, only 3% of non-Hispanic whites live in high-poverty communities compared to one-third of black and one-fifth of Hispanic low-income working families (Turner and Fortuny, 2009). Furthermore, if a black American is born in the bottom lower class, there is a 50% chance of staying at the bottom compared to a 3% chance of making it all the way to the top. Compared to this, white Americans have roughly the same chance to stay at the bottom as they do to make it to the top (Hernandez, Wealth Inequality in America). This could be largely due to the fact that it hasn’t even been a century since segregation became outlawed, immigration laws, or lack thereof, and stereotypes. While I have not experienced racial inequality, the data provided on American poverty today gives great insight into how racial differences have a huge influence over where an individual can improve in poverty.
In terms of gender discrimination, there is gender stratification, allowing men to have the upper hand in terms of “wealth, power, and privilege” (Venator, 2017). While I have not experienced the turmoil of racial struggles, I do understand the impact of gender stratification. I worked at a local pizza place throughout my senior year of high school and became very aware of the differences that gender holds. I worked as a cashier because that was the only thing I could be. I was not allowed to be a driver or a cook because I was a female. That seemed unfair to me since the cooks and drivers made more money. I felt perfectly capable of being able to make a pizza and put it in the oven, or being able to drive pizzas around, but my gender blocked me from being able to make that extra money. I got stuck with a pink-collar job and was unable to fulfill my full potential or showcase skills that I knew I had but were deemed as too manly or dangerous. (Venator, 2017). This is a clear example of gender socialization that leads to gender stratification. Gender can go hand and hand with the differences in class, but the game Spent lacks the tools to show this. To elaborate on that, Spent does not show the fundamental reality that women, especially single mothers, don’t have equal chances for mobility due to gender stratification. Gender stratification results in disadvantages for women in their education opportunities along with their occupation opportunities and can lead to a difference in their earnings and financial stability overall.
Spent has given me a new perspective on the idea that America is a society based on the divisions in income and wealth. These inequalities leave the impoverished making decisions that Americans in the middle and upper class don’t have due to their privileges. This game allows players to gather a deeper understanding of just how brutal the hardships of the impoverished can be, but it does not show the relationship between class, gender, and race; nor does it provide solutions to what can be done to fix the struggles that these inequalities in wealth and income create. Overall, Spent hammers down the idea of the continuous stream of adversities among the lower class, making the game less accurate than reality, but providing a much greater impact among players on the interaction they get out of the game.
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