Finally, a Mostly Okay Bailout Game

Since I've been talking so much about how absurdly awful the online bailout-themed webgame scene has been, I guess I'll provide a slightly less rant-y post here for Budget Hero's updated, sort of bailout-themed game.

Budget Hero's update includes one new "badge" to the game, allowing you to set one of your three requisite goals to be "economic stimulus". In the game, you are allowed to add to and cut from any part of the budget that the game provides for, a fairly sizable choice range. On just dealing with the Bush tax cuts alone, you have about ten different choices, ranging from keeping them to reversing them to reversing them and taxing the rich a little extra. Your goal is to achieve the best possible combination of a balanced budget (one that will collapse later than 2030 or so) and your three chosen goals (like "green", "social safety net", and "national security"). Every budget change you make that helps one of your goals contributes a sizeable amount to coloring in the badge, a fully colored one indicating that you were successful.

This is at least a thoughtful game. You are given many, many choices on what to do with the budget, and you can read a lengthy piece of text for each choice, indicating the situation, pros, and cons to implementing that change. There's a lot of information here, and you really feel the pressure dynamic between cutting your spending to keep the debt manageable and implementing the programs we need, especially with the stimulus.

I have a few problems, though. Your three chosen goals allow you to basically ignore everything else. I chose "economic stimulus", "green revolution", and "energy independence". That means that the game doesn't really penalize me at all if I, say, cut defense spending by 10% (which the majority of players have done, likely out of necessity to come near a balanced budget) or even something uncharacteristic for a liberal like eliminating Medicare, Foreign Aid, etc. Your three goals should matter the most, but the others should still matter. The party wouldn't support a move to privatize defense or something radical like that, even if it's not part of your specific platform to keep national security a priority. But, changing the game so that every possible goal matters would make things even more tense and realistic, and it is just a game.

The game also allows us to assume that we stay in absolute power for about twenty years to actually see all of our economic programs take effect. It takes a while, sometimes. Well, I've written enough already. Play it, it's somewhat educational and at least partially successful at representing the tension inherent in the job.

Trillion Dollar Bailout: Another Awful Game

If you weren't already sickened enough by the freaking terrible Bailout Game, enjoy yet another inane bailout-based webgame with Trillion Dollar Bailout! This one makes all the same mistakes The Bailout Game made, but with less humor and an even worse presentation. As in the other one, there is no limit on the amount of money you can use, and the bailout money is always good. Okay, then why is there any debate? Just spend all the money in the world, forever, and the economy will be perfect! Yay!

I did several playthroughs (the "play again" button at the end doesn't work, though) and here were the results:

1. I gave bailout money to two homeowners then had to leave the computer to do something else. I came back a minute later to find I had won the game. Unbelievable. It's obviously a weak game if you have to do basically nothing to save the economy. God.

2. I then made a semi-serious playthrough in which I bailed out every homeowner who wasn't labeled "Happy Homeowner," but rather "Homeowner - Foreclosure" or something like that. I won, perfect score.

3. Then I went back through and bailed out every business guy at the top of the screen, instead. I saved the economy. There was apparently no difference, though it seemed like the recovery was a bit slower when I gave it to them. Still, just give out the money, and you win.

4. Now, and this is the good part, I just let the computer sit. I never gave any money to anyone, nor did I slap anyone, which rejects them. I came back thirty seconds later, and I had won. Oh my God, this is stupid.

5. Now I slapped everybody. That made the economy go down. What's the difference between slapping them and not giving them any money? It's the same thing! This appears to be the only way to lose the game.

So, in summation, there is no point to doing anything. You win if you stay totally idle. You can give money, (as much as you want with no repercussions), and you'll win. It's only if you slap people, which doesn't mean anything besides "I'm deciding not to give them money," that you can lose. There shouldn't be any difference between slapping and just missing someone. This fails as a game and as rhetoric, because it isn't fun or challenging in any way, and it fails to reflect anything about bailouts. Don't dare click over to the game, it just helps someone who doesn't deserve the attention for the extremely minimal effort they put into this game.

5 Ways The Bailout Game Sucks

The Bailout Game is, to put it briefly, weak. It's a serious flash game about the current bank bailout process, and it tries to give you the reins on how to save and who not to. Gameplay consists of slowly (so slowly) advancing space by space, either saving or rejecting each bank in turn, followed by a humorous video or picture or something else that may or may not make any sense. Even as far as serious flash games go, this game fails on at least five levels:

1. Any rhetoric they may have attempted to splice in to the game is lost on me (and Ian Bogost, and others). Going through and simply bailing every bank out will leave you with about 500 billion in bailout money left and a place in the leaderboard. Mechanically bailing out every bank makes the economy actually grow. It would appear that the only way to get a better score is to skip spaces by double clicking the "Go!" button, apparently a glitch.

2. The game is very opaque in a way. If you actually try to reject certain banks, then random other banks will fail, and you're left none the wiser. Why should you even reject them anyway? On second thought, maybe the game just wants you to bail everyone out, even though its videos tend to ridicule you for it (old film reels telling you about "state capitalism").

3. The actual "game" part of the equation is shoddily designed. It's boring. Press a button to advance one space, wait for it to crank over to it, say bail or don't, see a gag/pull a lever like you're on a slot machine/play an easy timing game, wait for the camera to slowly pan over to the "recession" car then back to you, repeat. It's not efficient or interestingly designed. This would be fine if the above issues with the decision-making were interesting.

4. The comedy varies in quality. Some of the news scroll jokes on the bottom are okay, some of the old film reels are funny at first, but... If any of it had a point it would probably be better, rather than just "So Fred Thompson and John Edwards walk into a bar".

5. Otherwise, the game initially looks like a well-funded endeavor. Unfortunately, all the money was put into technical details rather than, I don't know, actual game design.

So go on! Play it, Woo!