A Visit to the Human Resources Administration

I felt a strong connection to a lot of the material in this game. You are an alien visiting the Human Resources Administration to sign up for SNAP benefits. In the process, you learn a lot about how human bureaucracy impedes and hurts others.

When I was first married at 26, we got a little government income from a disability program my ex had been on before marriage. There were tons of restrictions; for instance, we weren't allowed to have savings over around $500 or $1000 (so we had financial pressure to not establish any emergency savings and be more irresponsible). After almost a year, the government told us that we hadn't properly reported my income and we had to pay back thousands of dollars. I told them that our bank account didn't even have half of that, and they said, "Are you offering to pay off half of it now? If you do, we'll forgive the rest." So that worked out, but it was a real mess. We messed up reporting, they took forever checking.

Similarly, DMVs have always been old, decaying buildings (not enough tax money?) and hard to figure out. I ended up with a 'Female' marker on my Pennsylvania ID (which got me out of at least one speed trap as the officer found it amusing when I showed him my ID).

It's not all dour out there, though. The low-rated post office in my area had a stand-out clerk who pointed out problems I had with my passport application before a work trip to Spain and saved me about a month of work and hundred dollars.

This mostly-linear game does a great job of showing just how messed up the world is by making the alien go through the whole process. But then it goes through and says all the same things much less effectively and without any subtext by having a ranting human explicitly lay down the moral. I think the first part was so effective by contrasting the cruelty and inhumanity of the system with the placid alien, and the second part just didn't work as well for me. It's kind of like when you're drawing something and it looks good but you flip the mirror and the flaws just jump out at you; the first part was that 'flipped reality' for me.

The author's end note mentioned working in this area, and I salute Jesse for the good work!

Between this, The Burger Meme Personality Test, and Fascism - Off Topic, we're getting a lot of games about how much the US sucks these days. I'm not opposed.

Especially in the introduction, this game has many grammatical issues, usually comma splices or missing commas. But I still liked it. In fact, I liked it more than some of the better-written short IFComp submissions, because it has something meaningful to say about the world. This is just personal preference, and I'm sure there are people with the opposite opinion who would disagree with me, but I'm fond of social-issue muckraking stories. The SNAP situation as portrayed fails in crucial ways, and the recent funding cut as part of Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" will make an already imperfect system even worse. As Victor said in his excellent review, "we can never complain when we are called to pay attention to those whose life is made difficult".

Quotes:

"Let me get this straight - you're here to understand humanity, you don't talk to us, you don't ask us, you just sneak around and observe people being miserable at HRA and then say 'A-ha! Of course! Humans are naturally cruel!' What the hell kinda fucked up science is that?"

And from the author's note:

As long as politicians demand researched evidence that humans need food, we are fucked.

I was on SNAP (colloquially known as “food stamps”) for a number of years. That I’m not anymore is a matter of luck and not bootstraps, but I do still receive some government services related to disability. In my state applications/renewals can mostly be done online and/or by phone these days, which is relatively painless compared to the days when I had to get up at 4 AM and take the first bus to the HRA equivalent’s nearest location because they wouldn’t let you make an appointment for SNAP applications/renewals, it was first come first served, so if you didn’t get there right when the office opened there was no guarantee you’d be seen that day at all. But it's still not really a model of efficiency or devoid of red tape.

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration gives a clear-eyed and damning look at this system through the eyes of an alien researcher trying to understand humans through everyday experiences. Through defamiliarizing the trappings of the SNAP process, its absurdity and cruelty are exposed, but at the same time it’s clear that we are not meant to think the alien’s conclusions are correct when it decides that humans must enjoy being uncomfortable. It is obvious that viewing the humans going through the process as specimens has made it impossible for the alien to really understand the problems involved.

And then everything literally grinds to a halt so that a character can spell out everything we just read. I’m sure the rant was cathartic for the author to write, but it wasn’t really cathartic for me to read. I don’t know if it’s because the author is coming at it from the perspective of a social worker and not a benefits recipient, because I felt like I was being lectured about things I already knew by someone who assumed their audience couldn’t possibly have personal experience, or just because I don’t like when authors don’t trust their audiences to draw their own conclusions. But I thought the piece was weaker for restating its message twice, once in the most grindingly obvious way.