Month: December 2011

Gaming for Good – Winners of the PSFK and Climate Reality Project Game challenge.

Gaming for Good – Winners of the PSFK and Climate Reality Project Game challenge.

Earlier this year, PSFK and The Climate Reality Project challenged creative professionals to come up with concepts that address issues of climate change and to create potential game solutions.

The Climate Reality Project, which  focuses on the climate crisis as a problem that needs innovative solutions was founded and chaired by Al Gore and focuses on what they call one simple truth:  The climate crisis is real and we know how to solve it.

For the challenge – the games were to focus on climate change and meet one or more of these objectives:

•To Build Awareness
•To Promote Fundraising
•To Solve The Unsolvable
•To Embed Knowledge
•To Teach People New Skills
•To Improve Everyday Personal Behavior
•To Leverage Collective Manpower

 

In the Gaming for Good challenge, there were over 60 entries.  The strongest concepts were chosen by The Climate Reality Project, and are now viewable online.

I spent time checking out the winners of the Gaming For Good challenge.   One of my favorites is RealiTree, which is a game played where individual users of the game, while playing and making and tracking decisions in their lives contribute data that is merged through the game engine.  The users data that – once merged is used to  generate a large projected image of a tree in a public place which changes, based on the actions of the players. The tree is a visualization of the “health” of the climate and the choices of the users of the game.

Overall, my favorite games were built for mobile devices, and supported users in making green choices. The games can be viewed in an online presentation format on PSFK’s website.

Image Source:
PSFK.com – Gaming For Good Project

Links:

Gaming For Good Games – Climate Reality Project – Games (on PSFK) website

Gaming for Good homepage

Gaming For Good – The Climate Reality Project site

climaterealityproject.org

 

Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt –  Overview of “New Games”

Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt – Overview of “New Games”

Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt.  Ever played a game where you are part of a human knot? Bounced balls up and down on a giant parachute?  Or been part of a “human pinball machine?  In the 1970s, my parents used to have large barbeque/picnics in our yard in the 1970s with these types of games that focused on participation and interaction, and were part of the “New Game movement.”  With the recent talk about the “gamification” of things around us – I recently ordered a used copy of The New Games Book, which has a brief history about the games as the introduction of the book.

“New Games” was a movement that began in the late 1960s.  It was built around some ideas that challenged the traditions of games.

Some of the key ideas included:

  • No one should be left out, eliminated, or unable to play
  • Games are living culture, adapted and changed as required
  • Games should require no or little equipment
  • The rules should be easy and fun
  • Play and physicality were as important to adults as they were to children
  • Competition and cooperation should co-exist; but while competition can be important, winning and losing is not

The overall philosophy of New Games was: Play Hard. Play Fair. Nobody Hurt.  The New Games Foundation was founded to promote these philosophies after some New Games events were held in California in the early 1970s. Out of this came two successful books: The New Games Book and More New Games.

The origins of both the New Games movement  started with Stewart Brand who was a member of the Merry Pranksters, Ken Kesey’s communal, hippie, group.  Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog, which provided a toolkit of practical instructions people could use to construct environmentally conscious and socially sustainable lifestyles.

When an anti-war group in 1966 asked him to create a public activity to oppose the war, he created the game Slaughter. Slaughter was a game physical combat with nearly no rules except: throw everyone else out of the ring, and dunk the six foot ball over “the other side of the field”. The ball was painted like a small Earth. Teams were not organized, they naturally formed. When the ball got closer to one side of the field, people spontaneously switched sides to defense.

In many ways, the games were part of the anti-war movement.   Similar to a  sit-ins and be-ins, this was a “play-in.”  Out of the Slaughter game experience, Stewart teamed up with George Leonard, an Aikido master and proponent of Eastern thought, and Pat Farrington, a community organizer, to develop and propose the first New Games weekends in October, 1973.   At the first event, 6,000 people came to play.  The next New Games tournament were held outdoors.  Several thousand more people came to this event, as well as the third and fourth ones.

What was unique about the events was that while playing the games, everyone was included.  Some of the games were classics, such as Tug of War, but with several hundred players all playing at once and switching sides whenever one side was winning.

Some of the games were totally new. Organizers showed a group how to play by gathering and playing with them. Then they picked someone else to organize the next group.  Players became organizers, and organizers were players.

Most of the games required no equipment.   Some special equipment was used for some games: a large rope for tug of war,  giant six foot cloth-covered and painted Earth balls,  and parachutes for an assortment of cooperative activities and games.

Out of these events came the New Game Foundation and The New Games Book.  It contains dozens of games for two to two hundred or more players. Many of the games are more like activities rather than games but are physical and competitive.

The games were popular in the 1970s at camps, recreation centers, churches, and other groups.  The New Games foundation closed in 1990s, but the philosophy of New Games lives on in modern cooperative games, team building activities at workplaces, and other formats. Several of the original directors and trainers continue to promote New Games activities in their current lines of work.

If you are in one of my classes this Spring – get ready to play.  I ordered a used copy of New Games book – and we will be playing some of these games this semester.    Play Hard – Play Fair – Nobody Hurt!

Image Source:
deepfun.com

Links:

New Games – History and Overview (www.deepfun.com)

New Games Book

On the Rise – Corner Stores Stocking Healthy Foods

On the Rise – Corner Stores Stocking Healthy Foods

In communities that lack supermarkets, families often depend on corner stores for food purchases. The choices at these stores are often limited to packaged food and little if any fresh produce. Corner stores are also frequent destinations for kids, many of whom stop daily on the way to and from school for snacks. A recent study reported that student purchases are usually more than 350 calories on each visit to the corner store — and 29 percent of them shop at corner stores twice a day, five days a week, consuming almost a pound worth of additional calories each week.

The Food Trust, an organization in Philadelphia, developed the Healthy Corner Store Initiative to increase the availability of healthy foods in corner stores and to educate young people about healthy snacking through nutrition education in schools.

Food Trust supports storeowners in starting to stock healthy foods.  To be in the program, a store has to have at least 2 minimum healthy foods for sale (which could be yogurt, apples, small salads, etc.)  Food Trust will provide a refrigerator and give advice on how to stock and promote the items, and other information.  After participating in the program, some storeowners have reported as much as a 40% increase in sales after putting healthy snacks in the store.

The idea of using corner stores in campaigns to improve diets has spread from a few cities over the last decade — among them, Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Hartford and Oakland, Calif.   Today there are over a hundred or more organizations that similarly to The Food Trust are working to get healthy and fresh food in corner stores.

The Healthy Corner Stores Network is a network that brings together community members, local government staff, nonprofits, funders, and others across the country to share best practices and to develop solutions.  Network activities include bimonthly webinars, in-person meeting at national conferences, this website, and a listserve.  The network includes more than 500 participants all over the country.

A banana or apple on every corner?  Might be happening soon, one corner at a time.

Image Source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hcsn/5751767433/

Links:

Healthy Corner Store Network

The Food Trust

Getting to Grocery : Tools for Attracting Healthy Food Retail to Underserved Neighborhoods

Snacking in Children: The Role of Urban Corner Stores from Pediatrics Magazine

 

A Compost Bike Trailer- Making Soil in Brooklyn

A Compost Bike Trailer- Making Soil in Brooklyn

Have you been passed by a trailer of compost recently while riding your bike?

Compost for Brooklyn, founded in March 2010 in New York, is a group that transformed a vacant lot into a community composting project and a refuge for native plants and community members.  Every week, neighbors come to the garden to visit, and drop off their veggie scraps and other organic waste. In the summer of 2011 alone they received over 8,600 pounds of food scraps from individuals, local schools and businesses from the area.  The garden grows native plants that provide food and shelter for birds and insects.  The group also does education about urban soil and the environment.

Compost for Brooklyn partnered with Ditmas Park CSA and built a CSA / Compost Bike Trailer, which uses a bicycle as a delivery and cargo carrying transportation device to both deliver CSA shares and to collect compost from CSA members.

Want to build one?  A detailed set of free construction documents are available online.  All materials used to make the bike trailer are easily and inexpensively accessible at local hardware stores.

 

Image Source:
www.instructables.com/id/CSA-and-Compost-Bicycle-Trailer/

 

Links:

http://compostforbrooklyn.org/about/

http://www.instructables.com/id/CSA-and-Compost-Bicycle-Trailer/

 

No More Phonebooks? Let your Fingers help you Opt Out

No More Phonebooks? Let your Fingers help you Opt Out

I remember years ago when I wanted to find an address, phone number, or a resource for something (like where I could buy metal for a new art project) – and I would pull out the phone book and spend a few minutes looking things up.   In the last 5 years – my use of the phone book has changed to where I never use it – and whenever I have – I found it does not usually have what I am looking for.

Today I use the internet and online Yellow pages  to find phone numbers, addresses, and resources – and my phone book has gone from a weekly use, to sporadic, to none.

I also have increasingly felt annoyed with the number of phone books that I get sent to me.  There once was one company (usually with a name with Bell in it) – and the white pages and yellow pages.  Today I get phonebooks from multiple companies – and the books do not fit in one drawer.  I usually end up recycling most of them.

Did you know that there are about 540,000,000 yellow page directories printed each and every year in the United States?   To make these, over  7,200,000 barrels of fossil fuel, 3.2 kilowatt hours of electricity, and thousands of trees are use – all in one year.

Want to opt out of getting phone books delivered to your house?  There is a website where you can contact the company that delivers your directores, and request for them to stop.

Goto www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org, which has listings for phone book companies.   Click on opt out – and you will goto www.yellowpagesoptout.com where you enter your zipcode and the site will provide you with the local company/s responsible for shipping/delivering your phonebooks.  For my zipcode, 44121, six (!) came up.  I registered, completed the form to opt out – and hopefully I will not get any more phone books that I need to recycle.

Image Source:
sfreporter.com

Links:

www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org

www.yellowpagesoptout.com