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:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child’s play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning.”
—Erik H. Erikson (20th century)
“PLAYING SHOULD BE FUN! In our great eagerness to teach our children we studiously look for “educational” toys, games with built-in lessons, books with a “message.” Often these “tools” are less interesting and stimulating than the child’s natural curiosity and playfulness. Play is by its very nature educational. And it should be pleasurable. When the fun goes out of play, most often so does the learning.”
—Joanne E. Oppenheim (20th century)