Online game, Spent, shows how tough poverty really is

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 created Spent to raise donations for Urban Ministries, and she based it upon some of the limited options she’s faced in her own life. She grew up the daughter of a single mother who struggled to find work as a waitress and often collected welfare in a rural part of California’s San Diego County.