Wealth Inequality - who feels it knows it
A series of activities for looking at wealth inequality in the US and globally.
For games of chance.
Reverse Google Translation Poetry Slam
Idea for an activity:
Take a text, in another language, that you love (poem, song, whatever).
Use Google translate to translate it to English.
If the result is sufficiently strange, copy it, reduce it, and perform it like a poem at a poetry slam.
If the result is too normal, try translating the translated version into a different language, then from that language into English, or into another language -- repeat until you have freed the words from the original text.
Buffalo - variations
The card game Buffalo, by Mary Flanagan, is designed to be played as a rapid-fire competition between players. (http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/buffalo/)
It can also be played:
大貧民 - poor bastards
A Japanese card game which presupposes inequality both at the outset and as the game proceeds.
The flow:
The players are divided into five groups:
- the very rich,
- the rich,
- the middle,
- the poor, and
- the poor bastards
Monopoly with a real distribution of wealth and income
Simple idea:
Play Monopoly (or Life) with an initial distribution of wealth and income that matches the one prevailing in your society.
The flow:
Prepare the game. Joker gives participants a Monopoly set and a source like Wealth Inequality in America (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM) or G William Domhoff's "Wealth, Income and Power" (http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html) and asks participants to divide the property and cash among the players in a way that mirrors the actual division of income and wealth in the United States.
Cards Against Humanity
This seems like a great game format, combining up to date culturally relevant* questions and answers, many of them inappropriate (a good thing), with random, surrealist play. The instructions are snarky but include many good ideas. It seems like a great game to re-tool to fit your situation, if you can find the right balance of elements: commercial culture, obscenity, poetry, social realism...
I will definitely be using this in some way.
