Poverty isn’t just a game [View All]

[xchrom]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/poverty-isnt-just-a-game-2011-09-23

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — You’ve lost your job. You’ve lost your house. You’re down to your last $1,000.

Can you make it through the month?

Jenny Nicholson is tired of hearing how the poor are poor because they make poor choices. Let’s see what kind of choices you make when it’s your turn to be flattened by the economy.

That’s the idea behind Spent, an online game Nicholson created to challenge popular misconceptions about poverty. Play it at www.playspent.org. So far, it’s been played more than a million times by people in 196 countries. And Nicholson is challenging every member of Congress to play it, too. ( She’s got a petition going at www.petition2congress.com/5008 ).

Nicholson, 32, is a copywriter for McKinney, a national advertising firm in Durham, N.C., whose clients include Nationwide Insurance, Sherwin-Williams, Gold’s Gym, Coldwell Banker and phone company, CenturyLink. Another client is Urban Ministries of Durham, which advertises “food, clothing and a future.”