I have experience working for a year in a homeless shelter. I think that there is a “papers please” or “a dark room” style game that you could make that would simulate what it is like to try to exist in homelessness.

You have very few resources, many of which are provided by the shelter but only intermittently. You should expect your things to be stolen from you if you are around other homeless people (and to not be above stealing yourself), but going it alone has its own challenges. You probably have to juggle going to 3 to 4 different shelters and various resource locations every week and sometimes two or three in one day. You never have enough food you never have enough water; there’s never a place to go to the bathroom. You can’t show up to shelter locations if you’re on drugs, but drugs will definitely be a part of your life as there’s something that you can trade and sell for money. On a day when you don’t have enough resources at the very least maybe you could take drugs to ease the pain of not having eaten for a day or so, but of course this will exacerbate your overall situation.

I played a version of this on Zoom as part of a Columbia University program [1] designed to simulate the conditions of re-entry from prison, which have considerable structural similarities to poverty and homelessness. The Zoom game is based on one played in person with "stations" representing different institutions and "tokens" representing stuff like money, birth certificates, ID cards, etc. Your hypothetical scenario is quite a lot like the mechanics of this game. I'm working on building a single-player software version of it because the live simulation is rather difficult to stage!

[1] https://www8.gsb.columbia.edu/socialenterprise/initiatives/r...

this sounds like it could be really good if done in a mix of a simulator alongside a story like GTA where you are trying to get back on your feet

I think if you succeeded in making a game that successfully simulated the experience of poverty, it would be extremely unfun to play.

There is a popular misconception that poverty amounts to having your bank balance reset to zero. “Damn, guess I’ll have to earn it all back”. But what you can’t reset or simulate is the human capital embodied within you that got you to this point. Your lifetime of education, your experience of problem solving, your strong network of contacts, your history of good decision-making. You also can’t ignore the physical comfort that you, the player, would be in as you play the game. With all of that, you very likely could just earn it all back.

That’s not what poverty is about.

> I think if you succeeded in making a game that successfully simulated the experience of poverty, it would be extremely unfun to play.

I don't think you're someone that plays many videogame simulations, as the whole point is making something fun that's inherently boring in real life. There are so many popular simulators for famously mind-numbing jobs: farming, janitorial services (and further niches within this including powerwashing), driving for hours on an empty desert road (both as a trucker or as someone that's just bored), and more.

Here's a great game that simulates trying to survive in an imaginary Soviet country. You pretty much always die, are coerced to murder people as part of your job, and usually watch as your family starves or freezes to death despite your best efforts to keep them alive. And you know what? I honestly think it's one of the best videogames ever made.

https://papersplea.se/

If the goal is to actually present the experience of poverty, then yeah it would be unfun to play by design. I wouldn't want that job in Arstotzka either, even if the game is fun to play. I'd also never want to be a truck driver, but I love the idea of doing it in a videogame.

Uh, powerwashing, (sand,dry ice, etc)-blasting, is actually fun in real life. If I could get a job doing only that, I would totally do it. Janitorial work is actually pretty engaging and fun, it's the having to do it EVERY DAY for almost nothing and being disrespected and socially maligned for it that sucks! Driving is also fun!

And there’s a whole range of games intentionally meant to not be fun - there are sad games, like That Dragon, Cancer. There are meditative games, games that will make you angry, and more. Video games are art!

The person making this poverty simulator game could add a fun ludonarrative angle to it like Papers Please - or it could aim to be realistic and encourage empathy for those suffering. This War of Mine is an example that strikes a balance between the two.

While I have never understood the existence of games like Long Haul Trucker, they do exist.

I ran across a stream of a guy playing Euro Truck Simulator and it was hilarious

The host was hilarious and the commenters were all amused by how oddly therapeutic and also anxiety inducing it was

The interesting part of simulation genres is finding out what you need to change to make it fun.

What makes a simulation game fun varies per game. Stardew Valley could be described as a boring loop. EVE Online just yesterday made fans happy by getting official Microsoft Excel support.

The key seems to be to have a particular hook and perspective.

So, for a poverty simulator, you could embrace hustle culture and have people race to exploit loopholes in systems to maximize return.

Alternatively, you could take a radical approach at start with the crush of poverty and embrace it something like a rogue-like where you will probably always lose, but this time maybe you get a little further. Whether you want to embrace it ridiculously like Binding of Isaac embraced evangelical childhood abuse or be something else works.

Also worth remembering Papers, Please as a good example of a simulation making something "not fun" fun.

> EVE Online just yesterday made fans happy by getting official Microsoft Excel support.

That's the funniest single phrase I've read all day. Thank you for sharing that, it brought me great joy :)

What's even funnier is, it's actually true.

It also doesn't necessarily have to be "fun". I would argue that playing poverty simulator definitely should not ever be "fun". It might have plenty of educational or artistic value, though, which might be a good enough reason for some people to play it.

I definitely agree with you about Papers, Please. It's literally about doing paperwork and it's one of the best games I've played.

Most important to keep in mind the caution from Pulp's "Common People", which isn't even about the sort of poverty you're describing but just the ordinary lives of people who wouldn't consider themselves "poor" at all.

But still you'll never get it right / 'Cause when you're laid in bed at night / Watching roaches climb the wall / If you called your dad he could stop it all

The thing we can't simulate about poverty is that it isn't just a game, that when you're sick and tired of it and feel you've learned what it has to teach you, you can't just exit and not be poor any more.

Video games involve a lot of storytelling. Stories can be super powerful, and I think the world definitely has room for more games that depict and explore the experience of poverty. But that absolutely HAS to come from a place of direct experience. If you read a couple books, interview a couple people at a shelter, and then make a game - it won't be a poverty simulator. It might simulate the theoretical economics of poverty, or a birds eye view of the day to day mechanics of it, but that's not the same as the actual thing. SimCity is a city simulator, but it doesn't simulate what it's like to live in any city, or what it's like to be a city mayor or even a city planner.

Video games can help people understand things, just like that pulp song has helped people understand, but just like the pulp song it has to come from direct first hand experience.

Reading your comment, if OP is still around to see this, I think their simulator should be more from a 3rd person perspective following 1 or several characters who are poor, and where the player can listen to their inner voices, and/or make game choices for them and watch the characters stumble and maybe fail. Ideally the player gets attached to the characters and can feel sympathy as the hardness of poverty beats them up.

Cos everybody hates a tourist Especially when they think it's all such a laugh

But at least in a game I suspect that's more obvious than it is to someone on their gap year.

Well said, though!

I've been working on some free/libre open source software for 22 years designed to help people survive poverty and related conditions, such as homelessness, disability, illness, relationship abuse, emergencies, etc. It's called the Free Life Planner (FLP). The goal of FLP is to help people get on top of every security, such as food, water, financial, emotional, cyberphysical, etc etc. Its website is here: https://github.com/aindilis/free-life-planner I really need to rewrite the introduction to the FLP GitHub page since it doesn't explain the concept well enough, although the following use case does explain it more: https://frdcsa.org/~andrewdo/writings/homeless-story.html If anyone is interested in collaborating that would be fantastic, there's already a Vagrant image of FLP (but it's heavily redacted and out of date) available here: https://app.vagrantup.com/aindilis We're also working on finishing the installer for both FLP and the middleware that it runs on top of, called FRDCSA ( https://frdcsa.org ). The installer for FRDCSA when fixed up will be available here: https://github.com/aindilis/frdcsa-installer I would love to see a free/libre open source video game that used the tech involved.

Cart life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cart_Life

"He initially planned to finish the development in 30 days but he worked on development for three years"

Can relate

"CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience" is one of the best games that gives you an immersive experience and challenge of an everyday homeless person.

Yeah it's a pretty depressing and challenging game. I beat this game with all the different scenarios. If you play long enough though, you can find a pretty simple formula to win: - Find the nearest homeless shelter that is near a job board - Take freelance jobs, putting the bulk of your earnings in a savings account and only keeping a little cash on hand for laundry and other things (otherwise it gets stolen at the homeless shelter) - Spend all the rest of your time at the library studying until you can get a higher paying job

I'm not sure it's very realistic though because begging nets very little money and negative morale in the game, yet I think panhandlers can actually make quite a bit in real life in high traffic areas.

Being able to open a savings account without a fixed address is already pretty unrealistic.

The game requires you to have stayed at the same homeless shelter many days in a row before you are able to get an address and open a bank account iirc

I have done both spanging ("spare any change?")and busking in high traffic areas of California. Around Christmas I might make 80-200 dollars a day in a wealthy shopping district performing... but most of the time it was a couple of bucks and half finished leftovers, not a sustainable way to make money

During some harder times I tried to survive solely by collecting bottles and cans since I had often made some extra pocket money by picking those up aggressively. Turned out that it's not sustainable at all and I found it to be impossible to pay the rent that way despite living in a large city and tourist destination. Unfortunately I was also too autistic/self-conscious for busking or panhandling.

This looks amazing. Thanks for sharing.

IIUC, for better realism, you can't stop playing, you can't get new games, games you had before disappear, things outside the desperation game disappear, every week causes lasting damage to your console/PC health, government help with its Kafkaesque procedures stresses and humiliates you, neighborhood thugs randomly break down your door and use a hammer to hit your hands gripping the controller, but you still can't stop playing, because your only character is permadeath.

It's a long time since I played it but Real Lives (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Lives) might meet your criteria. You start as a child with some random traits somewhere in the world and try to advance your life. Some starts are a lot harder than others.

Very intriguing and interesting concept. Their website (https://reallivesworld.com) really leans into the angle for academic use too. Thanks for sharing this.

This War of Mine has some aspects of a poverty simulator, albeit in a war zone. Papers, Please requires you to allocate your measly pay at the end of the day, somewhat encouraging breaking the job rules for kickbacks.

"Diary of a spaceport janitor" may not be a poverty sim, and looks from the color choices alone far from one, but it does capture a certain mood; a common feeling produced by the 'poverty wage in a bustling hub of wealth' life.

Being a game, it's also an interesting take on exploring NPCs as a subject in games in a rather humanizing way, rarely do games treat them as having interior lives at all, or why far-out space fantasy still reproduces menial labor of our day without question.

This is the game I would suggest too. In my opinion it absolutely is a poverty sim. You work hard every day, but due to basic needs plus unforeseen events you end up never earning enough money to escape. The path that is suggested to you as the only means of lifting your curse requires doing a significant amount of extra work on top of your existing work, in a system that feels byzantine and actively hostile to your success. I really hated playing the game, and quit after a few hours of getting nowhere, but I suspect that was exactly the point.

I played this game. It was depressing as fuck, the music really did a great job of setting in how much it really must suck if you end up this way. I went in feeling kind of bad that I was about to play a homeless person simulator and the experience was pretty much like... ok yeah this is a video game, but it doesn't trivialize the experience at all. It was also clearly set in a time period before massive meth and fentanyl problems.

It's basically one of those survival horror games where you have to build a base with whatever stuff you find around to not die in winter. It seems like the people who played this game more than me were motivated to finish it because it's actually a pretty damn hard game.

If you want to know the secret of how to win though here it is: It rains a lot in this game and if you get wet you become stinky so things get hard, but there's a few places to beg for change where it's dry. Try the exit to the train station and you will make thousands. It's hella menial but you just make way more money doing that than working the crappy in-game jobs on offer.

I used to work in a homeless shelter where the fine gentlemen in there would joke about how people were stupid enough to give them money all the time. It's crazy how much money you can make on forgoing all sense of humility and exploiting people's sympathy in public. Addictive street drugs aren't exactly cheap.

Love the cheeky backstory, from communisty dystopia to capitalist utopia, but not for you

For sure worth a play, something about it really touched me. Bleak.

$30 is surprising for a game about homelessness.

This looks really interesting, thank you.

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

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.

I 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.

Sure.

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).

The one I think of immediately is CHANGE: A Homeless Survival Experience. Saw it in Games for Change Awards nominees and it has stuck with me to this day. 2D side scroller. Well worth your time. https://www.delveinteractive.com/change Definitely a topic which could really benefit from further exploration through games!

I'm surprised no one has mentioned The Sims. Starting a regular game without any cheats sure felt like being poor to me.

Browsing through the catalogue of stuff for your house and all you can afford is the most basic version.

I'm sure this can be improved upon with mods. Afaik they already have apartments.

Ah, I recall doing that in a very old version of the sims, by having someone destroy all their money and live on an empty lot without a house. Placing some items was pretty much required (IIRC a cable spool that counted as a table or a chair because some animations/actions were impossible if there were absolutely no surfaces to place stuff or sit down in the lot) but you could do a lot with the (free!) newspaper and with various things accessible in town to clean yourself, etc.

Generational wealth transfer and government subsidies are the only way out. At least that's what "The Sims 1 §0 starving artist challenge" shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A9HvZ4vz74 (10min)

Check out "Hobo: Tough Life", it's at the extreme end of the spectrum, where you have to beg and steal in the beginning.

>The Affordable Care Act requires you get health insurance. The good news? Your child is covered by the state. The bad? You aren’t.

According to benefits.gov you would qualify for medicaid on $1,441/month gross (the wage of the job I selected)

Many don't know the USA has a very large safety net. Medicaid, medicare, social security, SNAP, TANF, SSI, LIHEAP, EITC, rent vouchers, pell grants, job training programs, etc.

Who doesn't know this? The problem isn't that there's no safety net, the problem is that navigating it is a maze and there's tons of cracks for people to fall through. Many, many people don't get the help they need because of that.

Take rent vouchers: only some people who "qualify" actually receive vouchers because there is a cap on the total number the government gives out. Or the EITC: to get the full benefit your income has to land in a narrow band. Or SNAP: all sorts of weird restrictions, and tons of people who are eligible but who don't know to sign up

Or here's an interesting fact: SNAP (food stamps) have cost-of-living adjustments. When food prices go up, SNAP benefits go up.

But SSI benefits count SNAP as income and there is a dollar-for-dollar downward adjustment for every increase in SNAP.

So if you have SNAP, your SSI benefits will _decrease_ with an _increase_ in cost-of-living!

If you own a couple of grand in assets you no longer qualify for SNAP. Which is crazy given that 15 million people rely on SNAP.

Seems in a lot of cases the limit is $2500! Even a very modest emergency fund is probably going to be double that...

In practice you can just keep your savings in cash and not disclose it.

Yeah it's a dumb idea. Making people spend down their savings when they have no income to pay for food.

What else are savings for then?

The idea of an emergency fund is for unexpected expenses like car repairs or a medical bill. The primary use of SNAP is to supplement an employed person’s income so they are able to afford food.

Well if you only have $2.5k and no income it's probably going to housing costs.

(Am I here to answer stupid questions...)

It has a convoluted mess of programs, often mutually exclusive, that each have separate requirements and "churn" people off their benefits regularly with complicated and recurring bureaucratic burdens.

It's not actually "large" in the sense of total spending relative to other counties.

Yea except it only benefits you if you are way below the poverty level. We need to make sure every one is benefitted so we don’t deincentivize seeking higher paying jobs just to keep basic benefits.

Yep. Politicians for years have made it super hard to get benefits, and now decry people not wanting to work. There's a huge gap between "eligible for all benefits" and "makes enough to offset the loss of benefits", and no clear way to cross over short of getting paid $20+ an hour. Trying to make benefits reduce proportional to income would work, but requires a lot of bookkeeping and proof (and, of course, some political will), so that's unlikely to get traction...and raising the minimum wage to the amount necessary so that any job will take one over the gap is -also- politically undoable.

So, yeah. Lots of safety nets, all of which require you to live in extreme poverty to qualify for, and which still don't equate to a reasonable standard of living.

The problem is more that there's a whole bunch of different programs that don't make sense together. The "right" thing to do would be to combine all of them and make it so that you lose say 35¢ of benefits per extra $1 of income, so that even after tax it's still always better to earn more. Unfortunately, everyone is afraid that any attempt to overhaul the welfare system would be co-opted by those looking to gut it instead. So we're stuck with a broken system

Just make all the benefits universal, so they never go down no matter your income. This is the right solution mathematically. Politically though it's divisive because it also makes the programs harder to repeal in the future.

All you need is progressive income taxes and taxing welfare benefits as income. Make it so welfare dollars bump your income tax bracket faster than income from a job.

How do we pay for an expansion of federal benefits? The ones we have are already quite cumbersome on the federal budget.

Making the benefits universal would increase everyone's personal budgets to compensate.

The government's money was formerly your money. I would prefer to keep my money and help in my local community than pay more taxes to distribute wealth.

Actually the money was never yours, it was created and is governed by the state. Every paycheck we get is made up of units that were created by the state out of thin air.

Well your previous logic is refuted and now you're just moving on to some other shit like you never said it. Not a good look.

Aaaaand apparently, many also lack even the most basic level of clue about how many gaping holes there are in that net and how many people fall through that net.

It's not convenient to know that when your goal is to smash capitalism.

Not sure if you're aware of this, but it's just a lie, and the goal of telling that lie is political conservatism.

It’s also just not required

Jones in the Fast Lane: https://jonesinthefastlane.com

You start in poverty and can work your way out, but you can also get trapped. It certainly gives you the feeling of the grind: eating only the cheapest food, earning barely enough, having no time after work.

This was also the first thing that came to mind for me. It is very simple compared to what OP is perhaps imagining, but when I played it as a child the message definitely got through to me.

  I can't open your link but no matter, after several decades I still fondly remember getting a job at the burger place (and smart-ass comments about "you can save 6 hours and flush those fries right now"), saving up and saving up until I could get better and better degrees and jobs, and finally ending up as the CEO of the bank or whatever.

> Would it be possible to make a game that is both entertaining and educational about the real challenges these people face, at the same time?

Sure, just play Monopoly with a handicap against people who are really good at it and who collude against you. Not many folks would find that fun though!

Losing while playing Monopoly

Other than that, nothing really comes to mind, and honestly nothing could replace the constant stress of not being able to pay rent, food and utilities at the end of the month, knowing you can't and still be unable to do anything to fix it other than taking a payday loan which you also know won't be able to pay, bonus stress points if you have got kids

I did a couple of in-person simulations with https://www.crossroads.org.hk/global-x-perience/ several years ago. 100% recommend contacting them to discuss ideas, and if you're ever in Hong Kong, they're a fascinating bunch of people.

Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor might fit what you’re looking for. Or, dealing with the grind of a low-paying job is part of its loop.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/436500/Diaries_of_a_Space...

UK homeless charity Centrepoint created an experience in this vein - “In their shoes”: http://centrepoint.org.uk/intheirshoes

Related, for UK-based users and being discussed on HN now: “No fixed address bank accounts” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31302310

With the last round of "empathy games" (early 2010's stuff like Cart Life or Depression Quest, all of which got some play in academic game studies) one of the major objections that came up was that the player of such games may not carry this forward into any positive action their lives, but rather see themselves like the viewer of a TV sitcom, aggressively making things worse for their character for the sake of being a troll: "sucks to be poor, lol".

If there's a correct way to produce an empathy response, it appears to be Undertale's model, in which the player spends most of the game thinking that they are beating the game by killing monsters and ignoring the signs that they actually made an ethical choice until it's too late, further hammered in by an extra layer of permanence in the game's save system taunting them for what they did.

The downside is that this seems to mostly be a shame response, not a guilt response. Much of the resulting fandom casually overlooked the darker elements of the characters you're sparing, which are mostly revealed in postgame content. That is, the ethical behaviors are produced by manufacturing an attachment to the fictional universe, not by developing the player's philosophy of action.

If you want to take on this type of game, addressing the player attachments is priority one. Otherwise they disengage with the content and aim just to break the game systems instead.

That's a very personal take but I don't think this genre of game would be beneficial or even appropriate. I can see it in other comments with how people who play these types of games react, it doesn't really "educate people about the challenges these people face", quite the opposite, it gamifies real struggles and makes it look like a lifestyle choice rather than what it really is: a bad situation people find themselves in and that puts their life in danger especially in some countries.

The result of that is looking down on poor people as "they just aren't good at the game" except it's their life at play, not a high score or virtual currency. People who enjoy "janitor simulators" would very likely not enjoy having to scrub toilets all day long for minimum wage, people who enjoy bus driving simulators would very likely not enjoy having to deal with grumpy and sometimes violent passengers in real life, but they don't realize that, they look at the game and think "it's not so bad it's even fun I could totally do that for real". I don't think we need people to start thinking "being poor is kinda fun lol it's just about management".

A game that accurately portrays poverty would not be fun to play, and nobody would be playing it, because there's no end game and no win for a lot of people in poverty and many simply stay in that situation their whole life. Otherwise, just play GTA, that's as fun as it gets for a "start poor become billionaire" game.

I think it is a niche worth exploring. I have long thought of a vanlife game which would highlight homelessness. If anyone wants to work together on such a project just holler.

Might be interested in building a game together with this angle. Would you like to send me an email? I’ll put it in my profile for a short period of time

Emailing.

I’ve been thinking about a van life game too! - I traveled around the country in a travel trailer during the pandemic. Saw a lot of inner city homelessness, but also places like Slab City and Taos Mesa where people live an off-the-grid lifestyle.

The van life community is pretty unique because van dwellers are oftentimes adventure seekers; the state of drifting is sometimes by choice. Though the lifestyle brings challenges regardless, like parking restrictions, space limitations, loneliness, high maintenance cost, etc. And most of all, vanlife is still outside of conventions and one can be judged for it. I’d love to explore these dynamics thru a game.

P.S. Nomadland has been one of my favorite films. The book is just as good. There are millions who try to find peace on their own terms.

Isn't Papers Please built on this concept? Maybe not poverty but war/survival related is This War of Mine

Back in 2006 there was a flash game called

Ayiti: The cost of life

Don't know if it is still around but it was about a very poor family in Haiti

It wouldn't be fun. Grind, grind, grind, never get anywhere. Work twice as hard for half the reward, then get fucked over in every other aspect of life. Games are about escapism, a chance to win at something, not experiencing bleak and abject failure for reasons outside of your control.

Look at this thread. There's lots of interesting examples that are viable games. Not blockbusters maybe, but worthy of creation.

The SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge. Learn more: https://www.moneycrashers.com/snap-food-stamp-challenge/

Frostpunk is similar to this https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/323190/

Looks interesting. Seems to be more of a fantasy-dystopian "last civilization on earth" version of SimCity.

There's a lot of social problems that you have to cope with, like low food, low healthcare, forcing workers to shovel coal at gunpoint or else the whole outpost freezes to death. It's brutal.

Wow. That's hard core indeed.

Something like games these by Jane McGonigal

https://janemcgonigal.com/play-me/

> I make alternate reality games: games that are designed to improve real lives or solve real problems. I’ve been making ARGs since 2001 — and you can watch trailers for a dozen of my favorite ARGs below.

> Many of my games challenge players to tackle real-world problems at a planetary-scale: hunger, poverty, climate change, or global peace, for example (see: EVOKE, World Without Oil, Superstruct)

So disco Elysium is many things. Playing it was the first time I was extremely anxious about paying rent. One of the main ways you make money is collecting broken bottles.

This War of Mine opened my eyes to the horror of civil wars on civilian populations, with events much like Mariupol is likely experiencing today.

Theft, depression, drugs, violence, weather and exposure, shelter building, scavenging, starving, and watching your friends die... It was something I couldn't put down for a while and I think about it all the time.

You might try something like that.

Banished does a good job at simulating a resource strained community where bad choices can have terrible consequences in the short term.

I once wrote a game-like sim about "how to get rich" (which I named American Barons.) Java, desktop game, just to scratch an itch. and yes the player/PC does start out dirt poor.

closest thing I've seen to what you're asking about. I never released it to the public but I might have its code sitting on some backup disk somewhere.

I would like for there to be a game where you started with a budget of $X, and the goal is to maximize its effectiveness at improving the lives of the ultra low income people in your city.

Effective altruism on micro scales. And using ethical and legal means only, obviously, since the overarching goal is to be positive-sum.

The game "I Get This Call Every Day" conveys some of the experience of working a low end job in a customer service call centre https://davidsgallant.itch.io/i-get-this-call-every-day

Haven't played it by myself, but Pathologic II could be described as a poverty simulator. The game truly makes you miserable and puts hard choices on you. Do you steal food to not starve, when your reputation is sort of key to going ahead? There is even inflation in there. And a plague.

Economics Simulation of Norvig: https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/Economics.ipynb Not really a game either, but it's my favorite.

Just save a bit of money and then quit your job and see what happens when you stop paying your bills. The fact that you're that far removed from actual poverty is both highly encouraging and disgusting at some level.

Night Call is in the ballpark, at least. You play as a taxi driver, budgeting your taxi trips, passengers, gas money, money for other things (ie newspapers or clues) to help solve a whodunnit mystery.

Job Simulator possibly has some crossover with your requirements, and has decent feedback.

https://jobsimulatorgame.com/

Agricola

Not the same setting you described but its a frustrating one, it pretends to be a competitive game pitting the plays against each other but the mechanics for mere survival seem to override that.

Pathologic 2.

I second this. Most stressful experience I've had playing a video game. You will most likely find yourself shanking some random person in the middle of the night for food, despite negative consequences. The game makes you desperate, very fast.

The early game in The Sims is kind of like a poverty simulator, but eventually it gets a lot easier.

I assume that some mods and things of that nature can make the game more difficult.

Seems silly, this isn't going to be like poverty at all. Poverty isn't just low levels of routine spending.

A better poverty simulator is, maybe, go ahead and keep your high level of consumption, but cancel all your insurance policies for a year. Including car insurance. That'll have a chance at provoking some poverty-like stress levels.

That’s just an uninsured simulator. People in poverty could still have insurance if they are paying for it. Low levels of routine spending can get stressful.

Well, it's not a simulation.

My brother networked his friend playing a game called something along the lines of “hobo simulator” I’m sure it’s much more of a comical than serious game though.

Flip the DB board main switch at home. 100% real poverty.

If you have a vr headset, check out “Becoming Homeless” by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

It could be most beneficial to people currently in poverty, to try out strategies for escaping it.

That sounds like practicing standing up to school bullies by playing Street Fighter

I'm not sure exactly how you're meaning this, but I think there is widespread ignorance around how people whom are poor are simply unable to improve their lot. It's often not about making the right choices and more there not being any choices.

Yes poverty is caused by people not knowing certain strategies, and those strategies are of course known by people who are not poor... come on.

The strategies for the first steps out of poverty are different from strategies to rise within the middle class. So they're mostly not known by people who aren't poor.

For example, many government aid programs are (intentionally) obscure. Signing up for food stamps is so complicated, there's a charity that just helps people do it (https://www.mrelief.com). And there are plenty more strategies that help people, like for making cheap nutritious food. Any of these can be taught.

That's a good example of the kind of practical thing that people in poverty are more likely to know. Of course it's an example of a strategy for coping with poverty, rather than a step out of poverty.

(A common misconception is that by avoiding spending, one can escape poverty, but this is not the case, because poverty is a lack of income.)

exposure to / awareness of what I would call "financial horizons" is the biggest thing for me.

In poverty there is neither reason nor energy to waste beyond a conceivably actionable point. Learning to overcome that horizon is critical and I think it becomes more difficult the older we get.

Start SIMS but with 0$ and try to escape poverty trap

It’s a board game called “Monopoly”.

the genre should be RPG grind with hardcore resource management and psychological horror

That would be damn cool game!

just you wait till someone makes east europe simulator

yes, but they are very expensive.

oregon trail? dopewars?