Game Mechanics: Money, Economy and Game Balance
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Hello there and welcome to the second blog about DIGGERGUN's Game Mechanics. In this series, I'm exploring some of the inner workings of DIGGERGUN and revealing some behind-the-scenes info!
Today, I'm talking about money, the economy and game balance.
I’ve been pretty clear from the beginning that from an economical perspective, much of DIGGERGUN is based on the current situation in the United Kingdom. Food, bills, and rent are all based on real-life UK figures during the time that I made the datasets in April. Even tax and national insurance are calculated to real-world rates.
However, pretty early on I encountered a problem which I doubt any game designer has ever experienced: real life was too hard.
In play-testing, it proved too difficult to keep up with the barrage of taxes, bills and cost of living, on the £9.50 minimum wage the player was earning. If they missed even one day of work, they would immediately be making a loss that week.
Players were struggling.
So I had to go in and adjust the numbers, sharply reducing the costs, making them lower than they would be in real life. I even had to remove one bill.
It was a depressing experience. I could go in and tweak the numbers to make things easier for the player, but unfortunately, this isn't the case for at least 2 million people in the UK who are paid minimum wage or less (1). They can’t just adjust their life with a keystroke and make it easier.
Of course, since then, things have gotten a lot worse as the UK is being battered by record-breaking inflation, the highest it’s been for 40 years (2). And things are set to become even more difficult.
Given how I will be adjusting the economy again for DIGGERGUN before its final release, I dread to think what battered state Britain and its population will be in at that point.
There’s an interesting moment I want to share that occurred during playtesting. One playtester was genuinely shocked when they got their paycheque for the first time and saw their taxes and bills go out. He commented on how difficult the game was. In the second week, when it happened again, he was still just as surprised as he was the first time it happened.
he playtester said he really didn’t want to be reminded of the days when he was on minimum wage and the whole experience was a bit of a depressing throwback.
It was moments like this during playtesting that made me feel like I had created something meaningful. There was no character shoving the message into the player's face, telling the player “minimum wage sucks, doesn’t it”.
Instead, the player saw first-hand, with immediate brutality, just how much living on minimum wage sucks. And all I did was show them numbers when they picked up their paycheque.
I didn’t create DIGGERGUN to make people depressed, but I did design it in such a way to make people think.
Money isn’t talked about enough in the western world, and often it’s with a weird shame. And yes, maybe we should be ashamed that we have a society that enables people to struggle on such a grand scale.
But we can change things, and that’s optimism I hope DIGGERGUN exudes as more of the game is fleshed out and character plotlines are expanded.
Besides, if I wanted to make DIGGERGUN really morbid, then I would have set the minimum wage to £9.18. That’s the minimum wage for 21-22 year-olds (3).
And considering the player’s character is a young, university graduate, in real life that's what his wage would be. How’s that for some rampant ageism in a society that already punches down?
Sources
1 - https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7735/
3 - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-national-minimum-wage-in-2022
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