A ministry to homeless people in North Carolina has created a video game based on interviews with their people that is designed to simulate the difficult decisions and unforeseen hardships which turn ordinary people into homeless people. Although this may seem like a cruel joke, it’s actually intended to create empathy and understanding that homeless people aren’t all that different from you and me, they often just suffer a series of setbacks outside of their control. I don’t know whether people will enjoy playing such a simulation, but if it works to decrease the view that “those people” are different from “our kind of people,” it’s wonderful. After having played it, however, both Bill and I agree that it somewhat backfires. First, the things that happen seem overly pessimistic and unrealistic. Second, even with the setbacks, both of us managed to “win” the game by making frugal money decisions (despite the game not rewarding us properly for the ones we made). The problem here is that this seems mostly to reinforce the bias that “those people” are making their own bad decisions. “See, I made it work, and that’s on top of the game being so heavily rigged with unrealistic results to begin with.” Play it yourself and tell me what you thought.
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