The Why
Gettin' By's big goal in a tiny video
I got interested in the mash-up of social, economic, biological, and health factors in graduate school. I was fascinated by the research showing that people have better health and longer lives as they rise up the socioeconomic scale. That is to say, your health status is strongly linked to your annual income: lower income = poorer health status. The reasons for this are more subtle than you might expect. Diet, exercise, and smoking all come to mind, but studies find that poor people suffer more illness from poor choices than rich people making the same choices. Rich smokers, for example, are less likely to get lung cancer than poor smokers.
There was clearly something else going on to make poor people’s health worse. What was it? As a hobby (admittedly an odd hobby), I enjoy reading about the brain. So, I came upon the book, Scarcity. It explains how scarcity of various types (time, money, information) shapes how we think and behave in the world. A brain that is overwhelmed with poverty cannot function at its optimal level. In Scarcity, the authors describe social science experiments that induced the poverty mindset and nudged people into behaving like a person in scarcity would.
This was my aha moment: if a social scientist could create an experience of scarcity, then maybe a game could do it too. If people could experience for themselves how their thinking changed when they were in “poverty”, would they see it differently? Would they change how they worked with people in poverty to make support more successful, ultimately to make everyone more successful? A game that focused on budgeting money was not going to be effective. Poverty is much more than simply having less money than others. Though gettin’ by includes money-related situations, it also has other kinds of assets – time and energy; home and family; and work. The game forces players to spend all of their various assets as best they can, as they face real-life situations. Time scarcity is also built into the game, mimicking real-life constraints.
I hope you enjoy the game though it is meant to be frustrating and stressful. Your comments and suggestions are welcome. I would especially like to hear about how your perception of poverty changed, and how you plan to work more effectively with people in poverty.
Sincerely,
Linda Riddell
