I mentioned the French Cyber Budget game a week or so ago, but I couldn't find the actual game until Mark Nelson sent me the link this week. You can play Cyber-Budget online, but keep in mind that it's in French only, and pretty language-heavy.

Budgets are comprised of multiple allocations in conflict. They are abstract--numbers on balance sheets--but their effects are concrete. It's hard to personalize them and create empathy around them. This game is an interesting attempt to make budgeting playable. The main strategy is to contextualize the budgeting process in the material world through a map interface to buildings where you do the necessary business. Unlike previous efforts like Mass Balance, the focus of Cyber-Budget is not on allocating and reallocating numbers to actually balance the budget. Instead, the player gets a more abstract, higher-level sense of the fiscal and social issues at work in budgeting, and then a highly abstracted representation of the budgeting process itself.

The game has high production values and an interesting, welcoming approach to a dry topic. But it doesn't start that way. First, the game drops the player off in the library, where the player is expected to research and learn esoteric budgeting terms. I think the designers were trying to familiarize the player with the fact that such a resource exists and can be used at any time during play (via a persistent button), but the effect risks overwhelming the new player with the complexity of the system.

The majority of play between this step and the actual budgeting mission is comprised of minigames. The minigames themselves are couched as tests that you must complete to be deemed competent to construct a budget of your own. The first challenges the player to identify the components of the federal budget. A second minigame follows, asking the player to identify items in and out of the federal budget via a TV quiz-show format. I love the idea of a minigame for this purpose, but the implemented one requires the player to place abstract objects in income/expenditure columns. It doesn't explain the concepts, reinforcing the idea that the player was expected to do a bunch of digital reading in the library. The final minigame in the sequence is both the most interesting and the most maddening. It asks the player to match budget expenditures to their equivalent in "common" goods like Airbus aircraft, computers, or single-family homes. For example, non-fiscal income for 2005 totaled 25 million euros, or the equivalent of 161 155 million euro Airbus A380s. The player is given the unit cost of the Airbus and a choice of three answers (see at right). It's somewhat akin to a Brain Age-style rapid arithmetic/estimation game, and each response is timed, which made it a lot harder for me to appreciate, even if the idea is sound: contextualize unthinkable sums of money in terms of comprehensible products.

After each minigame, the game shows you the media response to your performance, which is a nice touch. I wonder how they modeled French popular opinion.

In the second mission, the player starts to make gestures that influence the actual budget he will create. It starts with a deeply metaphorical minigame, a hot-air balloon ride that tests your "budget piloting" (seriously, check out the image at right). You have limited fuel, which represent financial resources. You can collect Euro symbols to get more fuel. The environment is very trippy, with a dreamy soundtrack and magenta sky. The player must avoid the sharp "growth curve" on the top and the "deficit curve" on the bottom of a cave, and a Defender-style radar helps the player guide the craft through the environment. It's very hard to do. At first I thought this minigame was an interesting allegory. "Piloting" the budget too aggressively toward growth or deficit puts you at higher risk of crashing. Flying through the middle of the course and collecting the easy to reach income (not every Euro you see) is a more sound strategy. But, upon completing the game using that strategy, I realized I was being scored based on the number of Euro tokens I picked up (I only got 25%). In retrospect, I wonder if this apparently conflicting strategy wasn't intentional: the game is structured to require careful piloting of the budget from the policymaker's perspective, but the public will demand new programs and incentives no matter.

In the next minigame, the player answers questions for the press, for the first time offering opinions about what tradeoffs are important to him in preparing a budget. Then the player must balance different resources in another minigame, applying different fund types to funding requests. The game literally takes place on a scale, and the player must put the appropriate weight on one side to counterbalance the demand.

The last minigame allows the player to travel into the hypothetical future of various budget decisions. The choices are fixed rather than based on a set of allocations or even the funding requests the player just completed (unless the system had calculated them transparently for me), but they include different conflicting options like Public Services or Tax Reductions. I was a bit surprised to see that the future machine seemed to have a strong political opinion; it was not simply showing the pros and cons of decisions, but rather one or the other. Improving public services brings "a dynamism to the French economy and allows it to address social problems." The image on screen depicts a bunch of British immigrants fleeing to France. Increasing taxes causes French businesses and investments to flee the country. Reducing funding and public services makes it impossible to finance even basic federal functions. The image on screen depicts a rusted and cob-webbed tank. In the next segment, the player provides his opinion on a variety of budget proposals.

In the third mission, the player actually manages the budget for a three year term. The approach is unique; the budget numbers are fixed (again, I assume this is based on the opinions I gave previously) and the player cannot change them wholesale during the simulation. Instead, as time passes different interests around the country and world make requests. The player uses the map interface to speed around the city, considering proposals and responding to them through budget reallocations or refusals. While this concretization of budgeting trade-offs succeeded at personalizing the decisions, the sense of conflicting interests was hard to comprehend fully. When I reduced certain expenditures, the proper groups would request new aid, but inevitably they felt isolated. The strongest response I noticed was related to debt. When surpluses arose, both domestic and foreign opinion responded very positively to reducing the debt rather than investing in new programs or even leaving the budget untouched. Interestingly, all my decisions felt very short-lived. Opinion would dip back down even soon after a popular decision, based on other factors.

In this sense, the game was very successful in telegraphing the challenges of the political process of budgeting, but not so successful in representing the real-world effects of conflicting decisions. I appreciated the minigame design, the idea of slowly bringing players to the numbers, and the production value. There were some design issues, some mechanical (the mouse interface to the map is somewhat wonky), some functional (it's not possible to go back and change things you've already done in the game, so you have to start a whole new one).

But I felt myself pondering the game's intentions. It was commissioned by the French government, and by the end of one session with it (which took around an hour) I got the sense that they were not interested in fiscal literacy so much as political empathy. The game seems tuned to create an appreciation of the tough job of the fiscal policymaker rather than the fiscal policy. Rhetorically, I wonder if this wasn't the actual goal of the project, a kind of videogame foil Liz Losh has observed in other government-sponsored games. Cyber-Budget may not be intended to help citizens consider difficult social tradeoffs as they think about ways to balance the budget, but rather to coerce players into assent, given the difficult choices such a process demands politically.