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Game proves life can be fickle

Listen to this report by John Vlahovich

Delegates at the May 29 One Spokane Summit were prepared for their main job of designing a new community by first playing a game that showed them just how easy it is for someone to go from riches to rags - and vice versa.

Participants received "life resources" based on a roll of the dice. Some started with six, some with one.

Then they received different situations, job loss, home destroyed by flood, other events that either added to or subtracted from their resources.

 Mark Yoell started out with six resources. After three turns he found himself five in the hole while a tablemate's resources increased 300 percent.

"It was a little bit of a lesson in the randomness of life and the impact of that," says Yoell. "I guess I've been relatively blessed in my life to come as far as I have and to be as well taken care of by life and my own efforts. So I had this, I suppose it was, a little bit of arrogance to think that out of my own strength and out of my own efforts I could take care of whatever came about."

Julie Pratke, another summit delegate, says she found that life could change dramatically in an instant.

"The other thing that we found was that no matter how flush you were to begin with, it could be gone in an instant," she says. "My house flooded and I lost everything. First of all I lost my job and then my house flooded. But I knew that I had employment resources that I could go to."
Delegates at the One Spokane Summit worked to come up with concrete solutions to Spokane's economic and poverty problems. First, they played a game to understand how some people find themselves in poverty despite their best efforts.
Michelle Hegi says the game taught her that just wanting to be generous toward the less fortunate often isn't enough.

"It's not always helpful just to be helping people out of a crisis," says Hegi. "The resources that really make a difference are sometimes the hardest ones to get - an education, finding a better job - those are harder resources to provide for people."

All three found that players who normally thought of themselves as generous toward others tended to hoard their own resources even as their fellow game players were losing theirs.