In Ayiti: The Cost of Life, you make all of the life choices for a Haitian family of five. This game was designed to more “realistically and sensitively” portray poverty. While you start out a cute little family, after the first season my family had fevers and slowly started to die.
For me, The Cost of Life was disconcerting to play. The family was far to cute, and, as animations go, cuddly in the beginning for me to take it seriously. Then I started to get messages saying that the family members were getting sick, injured, and had run out of money. Suddenly, I had to start making hard decisions: Do I keep Yves in school or do I put him to work? Jean has a fever, do you let her rest at home or tell her to ignore it? In our world, those questions seem like they have easy answers: you don’t put a little boy to work doing hard labor and if you’re sick you rest. However, when your choice is put the boy to work, let someone work sick or let the whole family starve, the answer is not as obvious.
Morality in games is something that we’ve explored a lot this semester, both in readings as well as game play. I will say that the games that have stayed with me the most have been the games that have been the most shocking to my system, for example The Baron (which I thought about continuously for the next several days). I feel like these are the games that, while perhaps not grokking, I have understood on some level as to what they are trying to teach me. This makes me wonder whether games that don’t give you that feeling are just fluff, or whether they’re intended to create that experience for some other type of learner.
I would suggest that games which give off this feeling approach the status of “art,” while those which do not are simply “entertainment.” This is a categorization which is not limited to just video games, but applies to other artistic media as well. Playing sports, a form of entertainment, teaches skills the same way that watching Citizen Kain does. However, the skills learned are drastically different.