Studying Variations of a Game about Wealth Inequality
Other People’s Money (OPM) is an award winning game asking players to reflect on wealth inequality and our priorities as a society. Throughout the game the player plays around with huge expensive projects, juxtaposing the cost of these projects with the wealth of the richest 400 Americans. They also encounter bits of text, snippets that provide information and prompt them to reflect.
The game was iteratively designed to incorporate best practices in the communication of wealth inequality.
The main question of this project is whether the text snippets are worth it, and if so, for which audience do they work? On the one hand, the text encourages reflection, on the other hand, it might annoy players, especially players who are more conservative. To understand this, I made a version without the text, that just has the main visualization.
Understanding the effect of text will also provide insight into a big contradiction in the literature: the debate on how blunt a transformational game should be, balancing being overly annoying to the player with the fear that a player may miss the major points of the game.
I conducted structured playtesting and a large scale online study to better understand the player experience of OPM and its variations, to understand whether the text adds to or takes away from the impact of the game.
Structured Playtesting
17 playtesters played both versions of the game with playtesting questions interspersed. (Counterbalanced, some playtesters started with the non-text version, others started with the text version).
From this playtesting we arrived at the following takeaways:
- The interactive visualization shocked players: Stacking the blocks next to one another helped players understand the scale of different topics, an understanding that often came with shock or surprise. Comparing these items to the wealth of the richest 400 helped players understand what was possible through taxation, and the interactive nature of choosing between funding items pushed players to reflect on their own priorities.
- The game pushed players to reflect on their beliefs: Reflection during gameplay was usually low level; simple statements of belief, often said aloud while choosing topics in the game. Some players did go further though, wrestling with their existing ideas in juxtaposition with the ideas presented by the game.
- Emotions tended to be negative, with points of inspiration: Players often left the game frustrated or shocked. Despite this common experience, players also mentioned aspects of the game that inspired them; some players said the reflective text took them from feeling helpless to feeling they could make change.
- The text guided players’ thoughts, but that wasn’t always a good thing: The text gave players questions to chew on, provided more context about the game’s ideas, and boosted their stated engagement with the game. The fact that the text guided players’ thoughts in this way was typically seen as positive, though some players lamented the loss of perceived objectivity and preferred that the non-text version allowed players to organically come to their own conclusions.
Large Scale Online Testing
We had a politically representative sample of 300 people play the game. (Representative, in that our player demographics matched American demographics in terms of Age, Gender, and Political affiliation).
Some takeaways:
- The game was effective at shifting player belief: After playing the game, players were more in favor of government action to promote wealth equality (measured via validated surveys).
- The game variation didn’t matter: Regardless of the game variation, all measured outcomes were similar (no statistically significant difference).
- A player’s existing political affiliation didn’t matter. How long players played for, and how much the game shifted their attitudes was consistent regardless of a player’s beliefs before gameplay.
- Similarly, a player’s “trait reactance” didn’t matter. This is a measure of how likely someone is to react strongly when being told what to do or what to think. I imagined it would be a proxy for how likely someone was to quit out of the game in annoyance, but this didn’t turn out to be the case.
- While the game involved visualizing expensive projects, the game was ineffective at making players better at estimating large project costs (based on some pre / post-game exercises).
This has some interesting implications: I’d expected that a player’s political beliefs would really change how they approach the game. Potentially, a conservative player would quit the game early, but that didn’t really happen. Similarly, I expected that the text would annoy players or be a larger part of the player experience, but that wasn’t the case either.
I discuss these implications in the larger context of my thesis in my overall thesis takeaways.
