Play
The game consists of the player being presented with the Massachusetts state budget, which is 3.2 billion USD in debt with its taxes and expenditures; they have to raise one or cut the other to eliminate the deficit, and not cause problems at the same time (for example, cutting too much of the Department of Mental Retardation brings you in conflict with a Supreme Court ruling). After breaking even or better, they can then submit their work. The game then randomly generates conditions and applies them to the budget (for example, the creation of a fund to aid treatment of mental retardation offsets the cuts to it in the budget).
Read more about this topic: Mass Balance
Famous quotes containing the word play:
“Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in “playing” chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.”
—Northrop Frye (1912–1991)
“Ah, but to play man number one,
To drive the dagger in his heart,
To lay his brain upon the board
And pick the acrid colors out,
To nail his thought across the door,
Its wings spread wide to rain and snow,
To strike his living hi and ho....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“He was high and mighty. But the kindest creature to his slaves—and the unfortunate results of his bad ways were not sold, had not to jump over ice blocks. They were kept in full view and provided for handsomely in his will. His wife and daughters in the might of their purity and innocence are supposed never to dream of what is as plain before their eyes as the sunlight, and they play their parts of unsuspecting angels to the letter.”
—Anonymous Antebellum Confederate Women. Previously quoted by Mary Boykin Chesnut in Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, edited by C. Vann Woodward (1981)