Narrative Game Design · Serious Games
A second-person educational narrative game about the danger of high-interest predatory loans, played from inside the head of the woman holding everyone up. Interest never sleeps.
Most games about money are power fantasies: get rich, build empires, win. Compound is the opposite. It is about the math of staying alive when the floor disappears, and what a single high-interest loan can do to a family that had no other option.
My mom took out high-interest payday loans to help fund my dad's business. The business struggled, and so did we. Every day the loan grew bigger while the paychecks got tighter. Compound is my way of telling families like mine that we see you, and your situation.
One night you have $10,000,000, a husband, three happy kids, and a mansion. Five months later you have less than $5,000 and are forced to take out a loan to keep your kids fed and housed. Compound puts the player inside that fall, deciding in real time how to survive it.
Bank balance, time, and the health of Virginia's relationships are always on screen. Pay rent. Spend time with the kids. Bail out your husband. Buy groceries. Take the loan, or skip the bill. Each choice is timed with a one-minute clock, so the player feels the pressure of deciding without enough information, exactly like the people the game is about.
Decisions never reset. A signed contract becomes a folder Virginia opens later. A skipped payment becomes a late notice taped to the door. A second loan becomes a second envelope in the mail. The world fills up with the consequences of every call, so debt feels less like a number and more like a thing closing in.
Drawing on games like Papers, Please and Cart Life and stories like Maid and Nickel and Dimed, Compound makes empathy playable. The player doesn't watch Virginia survive. They are Virginia, making the impossible trade-offs themselves, so the lesson about predatory lending is something they feel rather than something they're told.
Compound turns a dry, frightening topic into something a player lives through and remembers: be careful what you take on, because interest never sleeps. It is the work I am proudest of, a project where design, writing, and a real piece of my own story come together to make people understand something that almost broke my family.