Ayiti: Strategically Surviving in Haiti

W505 Games as Learning Tools
Stage 2 - 4: Analysis of Strategy games and RPG
Title: Ayiti: The Cost of Life

General information

Ayiti is a strategy game centered on a family struggling to survive and thrive in Haiti. The family includes a mother, father, teenage son, teenage daughter, and adolescent son. At the start, you choose what will be the most important strategy for having success in the game with options including health, happiness, education, and money. Your objective is to keep everybody alive and as educated and happy as possible at the end of four years. You assign each player a role at the outset of each season and some options include work, school, home, family farm, and going to the hospital. You have the choice of what kind of standard of living they will have and you can also buy new things for your family given enough money. Random things can also happen in the game such as a cousin remitting money to you, sickness in the family, or a hurricane.

Analysis based on Flow Theory

o Task that the learners can complete
This game represents a balancing act between saving enough money, educating the family, staying happy, and avoiding sickness. Throughout the game you may be forced to sacrifice some goals to succeed in others. Enough money has to be earned by the family for example so that makes it hard to let more than one or two family members get a decent education. These tasks can indeed be completed though honestly I failed and killed most of the family my first 2-3 times playing. In an attempt to save money, I set the lifestyle to poor and I noticed that the health and happiness of my family quickly deteriorated. Upon setting the level to decent, I was able to complete the game with much more success.

o Ability to concentrate on task
In the beginning of the game it’s difficult to concentrate on and balance all of the tasks of the game. After several session though you get a better feel for what bad things can happen in the game and how to avoid them. You better learn how to balance the tasks and you can focus hard on succeeding in your goals.

o Task has clear goals
The goals and tasks of the game are clear. Lead a happy and healthy life for your family. Yet, these goals are subjective in that there are so many variations on how your family in the game can live that life. You could try to make lots of money but not allow your family to get a good education. Will that make them happy? You can focus on educating one family member and leave the others working. Will that make the family happy and proud to have at least one educated person? Clearly, if a family member dies then your goal has not been achieved but otherwise it’s hard to justify whether or not you have truly achieved a happy and healthy life for your family.

o Task provides immediate feedback
After assigning roles and duties to each family member in the beginning of each session, immediate feedback is given. The game continually updates each person’s health, happiness, and education conditions. This information informs you on the status of the family and whether or not your strategy is being effective. You are also kept abreast of how much money the family has at any given moment and if that amount gets into the negative territory, you are often immediately notified in that members who may be in the hospital or school are forced to go back home due to a lack of funds.

o Deep but effortless involvement
I found that while the game doesn’t provide really deep involvement in terms of the options players are given and the possible outcomes, I still found myself becoming incredibly absorbed in the game. I tested out different strategies with my family and I continually tried to optimize happiness and education levels. The game is pretty effortlessly involving because the game does much of the work and calculations for you after you’ve assigned the family roles. Yet, the real effort needed in the game comes from mental calculations such as weighing some options against others and being forced to make serious decisions that will strongly affect your family.

o Exercising a sense of control over their actions
This game does allow players to determine their own paths and desired strategies for the game. If you think making money is the most important thing, you are given the freedom to do so in the game though your family’s health and happiness might suffer as a result. Some things you don’t have any control over such as hurricanes striking and receiving remittances from your other family members. In one session my family was given the chance to accept a micro-loan from the government and use that money to open a food-stand. That food-stand was much higher paying than most other jobs and it gave my family a chance to use the excess money for other things like education. For the most par though, the player does exercise control over actions in the game.

o Concern for self disappears during flow
Despite making serious decisions about the life and death of the characters in the game, there is no concern for the safety of the player. Those decisions are only dangerous in the game world though they are enlightening because players can imagine how it might feel to have to really make them in real life. The player can question how they would really deal with those kinds of situations if they were really leading that kind of life.

o Sense of duration of time is altered
The game compresses four years of time into about 20-30 minute sessions. The tasks of the game became very repetitive and that for me made the game pass by very quickly. I did notice that I began to think that the time allowed in the game was too short though. I was keenly aware of how fast each year was going by and I often wanted more time to make further progress in the educations of my characters. There is only so much you can succeed in doing in only four years and the outcomes in the game are thusly limited.