New New Deal is a USC game research project created with grant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. The team developed a robust online simulation based on the “New New Deal” article series by Los Angeles Times’ economic correspondent, Peter Gossellin. The project creates an educational, interactive simulation that helps reader-users better understand risk and volatility in the American economy. In creating this project the team explored how interactive media, game design, and simulation can be used to supplement and enhance traditional journalism.

The project team designed and produced an interactive game in which players provide stylized information about their households, incomes, education, and employment, and then play out round of their economic lives through retirement. The outcomes from each round are based on economic statistics from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics located here: http://psidonline.isr.umich.edu/

In some rounds a player may get a raise; in other the player may suffer economic shocks such as a layoff, illness, or divorce. Players make realistic life choices throughout the game to help them maintain health, happiness, and financial solvency. Events happen to them based on the probability that they happen in real life based on the underlying household data. The game provides players with a more informed sense of how economic risks affect their lives and how choices they make at different ages can help and hurt them.

To play the game the player must first fill out a detailed profile in order to learn about her real life circumstance and experiment with a variety of life situations. This profile includes a series of life goals such as desired Personal Achievements, Family Milestones, and Net Worth. Achieving or failing to achieve these goals affects her avatar’s Happiness in the game.

Research from the economics of happiness indicates that Happiness is relative to one’s status compared to peers. The game includes an artificial intelligence driven set of neighbors – the Jones family. The Joneses are algorithmically generated to be similar to the player in Profile and Goals. If the player lags behind the Joneses in Goals then her Happiness will suffer. If she is ahead of the Jones on Goals then her Happiness is buoyed. After viewing life status and standing against The Joneses the player makes life choices such as Go to College, Date, Join a Gym, Buy a House, etc. Each choice affects some aspect of the player’s status and comes with tradeoffs – as in real life. After each game turn a newspaper is displayed. The stories in the paper are contextual to the player’s life situation. Positive and negative events occur at the same probability that they occur in real life based on the Panel Study data. The goal of the game is to retire happy and financially secure. Success is not measured in dollars. This means a player can succeed in the game if she achieves are goals, and stays close to the Joneses but has modest finances.

Creating the New New Deal simulator was an invaluable experience for us as researchers attempting to push the boundaries of interactive journalism, artificial intelligence, and playable system design.

• We learned about the challenges of making realistic simulation software outside the context of an entertainment application and the numerous challenges that can await there.
• We learned tremendous technical lessons about database structures for complex, interdependent systems. Databases are needed for the underlying statistics, the imagery, the choice systems, the goals systems, and the relationships between all of these things.
• We learned about the challenges of visual rhetoric in an interactive context.