Welfare State, a game about the anxieties of flirting with poverty
In high school, I played a game called Spent. This poverty simulator was a welcome distraction from an otherwise unbearable personal finance class. Spent begins by chiding you with the question: “You’d never need help, right?” From there, it’s a juggling act of rent, groceries, activities for your kids, and random setbacks in the form of injuries and car repairs. In Spent, once you get the hang of it, you can keep your head above water for quite some time. In Randy O’Connor’s new iOS game Welfare State, however, you’ve already drowned. Welfare State is, in O’Connor’s own words,”a stressful…