A Visit to the Human Resources Administration

I’m not a person who knows anything at all about film, but let’s not let that stop me from advancing a theory: you don’t want to end a movie on a medium shot. A close-up lets you zoom in on a face, an image, and helps the viewer understand the emotional impact of what they’ve just seen. A wide-angle shot dollies out to underscore the sweep of the narrative, creating an epic finish for the story. But a medium shot? It serves well enough to establish a scene and provide spatial context, but as the last thing you see, I think the viewer would wonder: what’s just outside the frame? What details am I not able to make out? What am I missing?

A Visit to the Human Resources Administration at first seems like it’s going to avoid that issue by staying in close-up the whole time. It’s clear from the get-go that the game is going to be all about social comment, as it’s focused on the process of applying for SNAP (colloquially known as food stamps ) benefits, but rather than gritty realism, it opts for fantasy: the protagonist isn’t someone who’s down on their luck, but rather an alien disguised as a human to do research about how earth’s food assistance programs are administered. The setup provides a perfect excuse to linger on the absurd minutiae of the public welfare bureaucracy – the inconsistent paperwork requirements, the perennially-glitchy equipment, the hostile environment. This is all brand new to the alien, and its estranging viewpoint helps a player who isn’t familiar with this stuff revise their assumptions, and question for themselves for why we tolerate this. The prose does a good job of making completely clear what’s going on, while mixing in enough sci-fi comedy to make the critique go down:

"Spoke with a human at the entrance, seems to be some kind of uniformed worker, maybe a firefighter? Note to self: have to brush up on human worker categories.
Firefighter, judging by human social customs, was rude.
Room is brightly lit, gray, tan and white, very bare. My human body has an uncomfortable reaction to it. Curious. Note to self: why would humans create a building they are uncomfortable in? Points to Skrzyyyyt’s theories on human suffering - do they enjoy discomfort?"

Beyond the writing, the design is also engaging; it’s all simple Twine choices, but given the setup you know whatever you try is going to lead to something screwing up, leaving the player trying to figure out how maximize their chances of successfully applying while also looking ahead to guess how it’ll eventually go wrong. The game doesn’t need to get didactic to make its points – presenting a fine-textured look at the lived experience of people who rely on these systems for their survival is advocacy enough.

Unfortunately about ¾ of the way through its short running time, Visit to the HRA does in fact get didactic. The alien has a gadget that lets it freeze time to take notes on its observations, but for some reason one human winds up being immune to the gizmo, and upon learning what the alien’s up to, gets angry and calls it out for studying humans in need as though they were bacteria specimens on a petri dish. Then the game ends and there’s an even more directly condemnatory author’s note (no surprise, they actually are a social worker who’s directly worked with these systems):

"The waste, indifference, and poor quality of service at HRA exemplifies inept bureaucracy and systemic oppression. I’m also disturbed by the desire to study people when we are vulnerable. The inhumane distance created by needing to justify or understand the basic truths that people need food, safety, housing, health, etc. is deeply troubling. As long as politicians demand researched evidence that humans need food, we are fucked."

It’s hard to disagree with any of this, but I found this final chunk of the game much less effective than the rest. Zooming out to the level of argument leaves behind the concrete accumulation of specific SNAFUs, mistakes, and indifference so effectively portrayed in the first part of the game, but it also feels like it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Like, it’s deeply weird to be playing a game about SNAP just two months out from the biggest SNAP cut in American history, with no mention of the fact that the awful picture the game paints will in a couple years’ time be a best-case scenario. The fact that this welfare agency sucks is the result of specific, contested political processes redirecting resources from the poor to the rich, not just bureaucratic inertia, so it feels like a misstep that there’s not really any direct mention of class or politics anywhere here.

As for the research piece, I’m likewise sympathetic to a lot of these critiques: I work for an organization that has a whole bunch of protocols to make sure our research is community-led as well as community-benefitting because we’re aware of how extractive traditional research models can be – and even with that awareness and those systems, we certainly don’t get it right 100% of the time. But it’s also the case research into public welfare systems is extremely important: for example, deep studies of what’s happened when states have adopted “work requirements” for SNAP and Medicaid allow us to know that all this talk of personal responsibility is a smoke-screen, and the primary impact is that eligible people will get thrown off their benefits due to the increased red tape “verifying” that they’re actually looking for work. Again, there are a lot of bad practices to expose and reform here, but without more specific examples of how they play out, or more perspective on the structural factors producing these bad effects, the game’s impact is blunted.

I don’t want to complain too much since this is a well-constructed and well-meaning game that, at least until the end, deftly takes on an often-underappreciated social problem with grace and humor. But I do think it would have worked better if it had stopped right when the time-freeze gizmo did – it would have avoided the lens being awkward middle-distance, the final shots neither sufficiently focused on concrete lives nor on the structural reasons these things are the way they are.