ProjectProposal-MuQingJing
From CS 160 Fall 2008
Contents |
Target User Group
The target user group are young adults with a generous amount of income (for example, CS majors from Cal working at tech companies upon graduation), or anyone who does not have a strong financial management background.
Problem Description
Most college graduates are typically uninformed (or uninterested) in personal finances. This problem is compounded when some of these graduates start making six-digit salary figures, but have never managed money in such quantity before. Investments, credit, loans, purchases, and taxes can give anyone a headache, but for these young adults, it can lead to dangerous and life-altering financial decisions. This game would be able to educate (via a fun and entertaining medium) our target audience in order to allow them to proactively engage in decisions that strongly affects their financial well-being.
Problem Context and Forces
Obviously, the market status at the time will affect certain aspects of the game, but for the most part, all the aspects of personal finance management are important. Inherently, such things as managing bills, credit cards, and loans are probably the most important aspects in most people's eyes. After all, most people view saving money as an important facet of life. However, other things such as retirements funds, smart investments, and tax management are arguably more important, as the ability to generate money is a much more powerful than solely saving money. From past experiences, many college grads sorely lack the understanding of managing investments and portfolios (which are very important once you factor in stock options that many companies offer), and the population in general is fairly out-of-tune with retirement fund management. For example, many people believe impulse purchases and making smart financial decisions are mutually exclusive; however, it can be said that the purpose of making smart financial decisions is so that you can make these impulse purchases with little repercussions. Hopefully, this game will not only allow people to become more aware of the different options and services that exist to help them manage, maintain, and build their financial stability, but it will also allow them to learn at least the basics skills needed to survive financially.
Solution Sketch
Many educational endeavors have incorporated games into its ultimate goal; Math Blaster taught arithmetic and algebra in a fun way, Mavis Beacon effectively taught typing skills, and Oregan/Yukon Trail gave young students a taste of the life of pioneers during the Manifest Destiny era of the 1800's. However, a common theme among all of these has been that these games have been marketed towards the younger audience. Perhaps people believe that older audiences have long enough attention spans that a game is unnecessary and seminars are sufficient ways of conveying information. This, however, is only true if the viewer is attending a seminar that they are actually interested in; if it's for something they couldn't care less about, they're attention span would only be marginally longer than that of a hyperactive kindergartner. By using a game to distribute the information, the ability to market to a much wider audience is achieved, and the effectiveness overall is improved.
With this in mind, I feel that the game can be modeled after a real-life RTS/RPG game. You would control yourself (with user-provided inputs such as career, salary, age, gender, address, etc) to a certain degree, with most of the emphasis placed on financial decisions. Early on, the game would walk you through a tutorial-like scenario; the game makes suggestions for you as to what decision to make and backs it up with reason and logic. Outside of this tutorial, you can make decisions as you like (things like when to pay the bills, how much to pay off at once, whether or not to mortgage your house, whether or not to finance a car, etc). As you go through life, pitfalls or eurekas may occur; you might get married, have children, have a sudden medical emergency, be the victim of a robbery, etc). In this sense, the game is able to maintain the interest of most players, as they would have a vested interest in the financial well-being (and by association, the complete well-being) of their virtual selves. Once the character dies, the game ends, with a thorough evaluation of their life progress and a review of the choices they made. Feedback is given, suggestions are made, and ultimately the game should provide sufficient information such that the player becomes more and more knowledgeable each time they play.
