FULL TITLE: The Saving Game
ABSTRACT: As more and more states have legalized different forms of gambling in recent years, local groups around the country have sprung up to organize against casinos in their communities. Recently, a unified national movement has begun to take shape, and the common theme emerging is that this is a fight against "predatory gambling."
This frame begs the question: What would non-predatory gambling look like? In trying to answer that question, we are developing a platform that uses games to facilitate long-term savings. The goal of this project is to turn the problem of gambling addiction on its head; by channeling money that is "lost" in a game into savings accounts, the risk is reduced or removed. This system would replace the traditional house vs. player dynamic with one where players are betting against their future selves with the house acting as a facilitator. Because the house in these games would function in a similar manner as a bank, we also see opportunities to introduce players to other forms of savings and money management.
We are in the early stages of developing these games and hope to begin trials soon to help clarify questions about how these games would function in the real world, as well as the morality of creating a addictive savings product.
BIOGRAPHY: Nick Jehlen and Jethro Heiko, The Action Mill
Nick and Jethro are the Creative Director and Organizing Director, respectively, of The Action Mill, a consulting group. In their work, they blend traditional, nonviolent direct action with innovative interventions that build power for communities of people and repurpose technology that tends to isolate into tools that create connections. They focus on building tools and techniques that assist people in making change directly and on training groups to design their own tools to solve their own problems.
Jethro Heiko has been an organizer for over 13 years. He started his career in college by founding a bereavement support program for students. After graduating he organized in the Fenway community of Boston where he led the successful effort to renovate rather than demolish Fenway Park. In 2004 he was the national director for Turn Your Back on Bush, which brought 5,000 people to Washington, DC for a silent and simple response to George Bush's second inauguration. He is a founder of both Neighbors Allied for the Best Riverfront and Casino-Free Philadelphia.
Nick Jehlen has been building tools for organizers for 15 years, including large-scale projections, text-message loops, and community Web sites. Since 2006, he has run the Enough Fear campaign, which holds events in public spaces in the US where people are invited to use red, old-fashioned phones to talk directly to volunteers in Iran in order to dramatize the need for direct, peaceful negotiations. In 2008, Jehlen was one of the organizers of Winter Soldier: Iraq & Afghanistan, an project of Iraq Veterans Against the War that broadcast three days of testimony by veterans to sites around the world. He has been the art director of The Progressive magazine since 1999. Prior to that, he was art director at Boston Review and an interactive designer at WGBH in Boston.
Rob Peagler
Rob Peagler is a senior consultant with Matter LLC, a design driven strategy firm located in Atlanta, GA. He is currently focusing on the firm’s multi-stakeholder social value creation projects including collaborators such as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the State of Georgia’s Department of Economic Development and Georgia Tech’s Experimental Game Lab. Prior to joining Matter, he had a fellowship with MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice. Building on that work, Peagler co-founded the Design Studio for Social Intervention where he provided guidance in applying design thinking to the resolution of intractable social problems. In 2007 he lead the Studio’s collaboration with Georgia Tech's Emergent Game Lab on a Big Urban Game for the over 10,000 attendees of the United States’ first national social forum. His previous employers and clients have included the Market Analysis & Strategy Group at IBM Research, Steelcase Inc.’s Advanced Concept Research and Design unit, the Cynefin Centre for Organizational Complexity (now Cognitive Edge, LLC), Razorfish Inc., and Seasons Fund for Social Transformation.
