I remember throwing a fit in the kitchen as a child. Not a proper little-kid tantrum, more of an adolescent sulk. I was not turning out to be very cool in school, and I thought part of what was holding me back was that I did not have the right brand of clothes.

Why do we have to get everything at the fucking outlet store instead of the mall, it’s not like the prices are that different, and on like that.

That night my dad made me a game, basically.

More like a simulation. He printed out pretend money (I think he might have put his face on it), and a spreadsheet of expenses. He gave me a big stack of bills, asked how much should be spent on Leigh’s clothes, and, feeling very clever, I suggested what seemed like a fair but generous amount.

Then Dad began to enumerate all our expenses, and as he did so he took the requisite number of bills away from me, and continued taking them away. At the end of it I clutched a few thin strips of paper, and found myself unexpectedly crying, while feeling like I ought to be too old to be crying.

“It’s not that we don’t love you,” Dad said.

Games can illustrate the fairness or unfairness of systems like nothing else. That evening I understood “we can’t afford it”, finally, even though my mother had said it to me many times before to no effect.

Here is my newest Kotaku column about Animal Crossing and economic anxiety.. The weird feeling like I ought to be too old. For these kinds of feelings. For video games, maybe.

More on the reality of budgets versus our imagination: I did a feature on what Kickstarter is revealing about the unfortunate nature of game development costs and schedules. And I also wrote five key PR tips for indies trying to make it on their own.

I’ve been doing book reviews for the New Scientist’s Arc zine: most recently I wrote about Austin Grossman’s “You,” a novel about the bleak, weird insides of game development, and about Simon Urban’s Plan D, a fiction that supposes the Berlin Wall never fell.