Beggar Simulator: Istanbul

Istanbul, some year, some street. A man is on the pavement without a lira in his pocket and no key to anywhere. How he got there is his own business.

He is not a beggar. He is a man doing beggar, and he has to do it well enough that nobody watching gets suspicious — for as long as it takes.

THE MENU IS A TRAP

Walk up to somebody, press E , and the pitch begins. Four lines, a patience bar draining in real time, and no right answer — only tones: pity, flattery, guilt, silence. The catch is that the menu knows what your act forbids, and it puts that line in front of you for the biggest payout on the screen. A blind man cannot tell a woman she has beautiful eyes. He cannot tell a man he dropped his money either, however clearly he watched it fall. Those are the lines that pay.

RENT AN ACT, WEAR IT ALL DAY

Every morning you pay for the day before you earn anything: the act, the props, the pitch. Cardboard is free and honest and pays the least. Sunglasses and a cane pay more and cost you every line about anything you can see. Crutches take your legs; the wheelchair takes the most and gives the most. An act is not a bonus. It is a list of the things you can no longer say.

HEAT: EVERY LIRA IS SOMEBODY BEING BOTHERED

The only way to earn is to get close to people, and getting close is already a nuisance. Follow him. Step into his path. Take his sleeve. Walk him to his car. Each one pays, and each one fills the Heat bar — and so does having a very good day, because a beggar taking too much gets noticed. When it fills, the zabıta comes, and there are only three answers: pay the fine and keep the day (the bar does not reset — he will be back tomorrow), hand over everything you took (the bar resets, clean slate), or run — which pays nothing, exposes the act in front of the whole street, and burns the district for days.

FIVE PITCHES, FIVE DIFFERENT JOBS

The metro underpass is narrow, loud and free, and its stairs are a trap if you came in a wheelchair. The mosque courtyard is dead all week and detonates for five minutes after prayer — and on Friday it is the best money in the city, once. The junction runs on a forty-second red light: get in among the cars, work the windows, be out before it turns green. Kapalıçarşı is a labyrinth where the shopkeepers learn your face. İstiklal works nights, and half the crowd is drunk — the same sentence gets you five lira or five hundred, and only the way he walks tells you which. Two of the five are open on day one. The other three belong to somebody, and money is exactly what those men will not take: one wants to hear you outran the zabıta and still came home paid, one wants four hundred lira taken off a politician in a single conversation, and one only respects a clean day.

SOME MARKS ARE A CONVERSATION

A politician working the crowd for votes will not be moved by a paper cup, but he can be worked — over three rounds, in front of an audience whose mood you are also managing, where what you said in round one is still in the room in round three. A drunk at two in the morning is a different game with the same verb: read him, then decide whether to push.

THE STREET IS ALREADY SOMEBODY'S

A kid with a squeegee is working your junction and will not simply go away: pay him a cut, or face him down and find out. A pickpocket wants a percentage of a day he did not work, and getting it back means winning something first. The shopkeepers will also just hire you. Carry a tray of tea across a crowded alley without spilling it, hand out flyers on the avenue — real work, paid honestly, done in the middle of a shift you were supposed to be begging.

THE NIGHT COSTS MONEY TOO

The day ends with a table and a list. A bed, a wash, the pharmacy — and at the week's end, the jar. Most nights the money does not cover all of it, so the question is not how much you made but which line you are going to skip. Three hundred lira buys a bed in a pension: five strangers, a ticking radiator, and nothing happens. That is what the money is for. Skip it and the table tells you exactly what you will be carrying out there tonight — and then you lie down in the underpass with your eyes shut, and something comes near, and you get one sentence to decide by. Things that go past are nothing. Things that stop are a hand.

HUNGER, FILTH AND THE THING THAT WORKS

Being hungry pays better, right up until you faint in the street. Being filthy pays better, right up until nobody will come near you. Being ill costs you nothing at all until the day it costs you everything. The whole economy is built on one joke that is not a joke: the worse your life gets, the better you are at this job.

[hr][/hr] Every night, the same table. Every night, the jar. It says only how much you have and how much you need, and it never says what for.