Recently, on a recommendation on this blog, I tried Ayiti, about the difficulty of making ends meet as a poor family in Haiti. It’s deeper and more playable than some of the other political games I’ve mentioned here recently: the interface is mostly well-designed (though I had a couple of particular gripes); there’s enough variation from playthrough to playthrough that you have to adapt your strategy a bit even when you think you’ve cracked the game; and it didn’t feel like preaching to the choir, at least not all the time. The first message you’ll take away from it is that life in Haiti is insanely hard and that simply not dying from year to year takes terrific effort. This is probably an intended lesson. After a while, though, you start to find that you can educate the family a bit, start them getting jobs that pay better, and begin to scratch your way free of the biting poverty; though you will certainly never amass enough money to buy the family the big-ticket item at the store, the 20,000 goud house, which must remain forever a dream. Lots of particular strategies have come up on the, and they reveal some of the game’s simulation assumptions in more detail.

Some of the assumptions seem completely sensible. It’s hardest to make money when you have nothing; a bit of capital for transportation, books, and proper eating make a world of difference. This, of course, supports the idea that we should all contribute to UNICEF, since even relatively low-priced items can make such a huge difference to the quality of life of the people living there. Some of the game’s other strategic messages are a little more dubious. As a number of people mention on the thread, it’s often best *not* to send the children to school or the parents to vocational training: if they volunteer for UNICEF projects, they spend nothing (where school costs money), they get some education points (though not necessarily as quickly as they might at school), and they contribute to community development projects.

Playing 4 Keeps is supported by Microsoft’s U.S. Partners in Learning Mid-Tier initiative. Last year, Global Kids Youth Leaders gained leadership, research, and game design skills while producing a socially conscious online game, Ayiti: The Cost of Life. Sep 19, 2013  Game url: Hacks: Your family members don't die. Good events happen instead of bad events.

Once the volunteers have built a community center, a library, and a health center, they start to receive additional benefits to literacy and health care for the whole family; it’s like being able to send all five people to school at once, for free. And, oh yeah, volunteer work gives you satisfaction, so it adds to your Happiness, too. I’m a little skeptical of this: it seems to suggest that in Haiti you can get the equivalent of a school degree or technical degree without ever darkening the door of a classroom at all, and also that volunteering for UNICEF is just about the best application of time imaginable for young people. Maybe this is partly true — maybe volunteer work does confer educational benefits on the volunteers, and it’s reasonable to work that into the simulation. But I suspect it would be more accurate and also seem a little less self-serving if the kids did have to go to school at least for a season or two in order to merit the higher degrees. Though who knows?

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Maybe I am just mis-imagining the Haitian educational system. A bit more disturbing even than that is the fact that an optimum game-play strategy requires fairly seriously neglecting the family’s health, especially during the early stages of the game. It is, of course, important not to let any of them die. If both parents die, you lose the game, but even without that, reducing the number of family members will cut into everyone’s happiness and productivity for the rest of the playthrough.

So you don’t want to kill them. But you *do* want to work them just as hard as you can without killing them: this brings in money, which you need to acquire rapidly in the first few seasons in order to buy livestock and make other lifestyle advances. If you get a slow start on those things, then you’re permanently crippled. Besides, just letting family members rest at home doesn’t tend to cure them effectively.