Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (44 page)

“The forces in play in the Earth system are astronomically massive and unimaginably complex,” Brand writes.
³
“We’re facing multidecade, multigeneration problems and solutions. Accomplishing what is needed will take diligence and patience—a sustained
bearing down
, over human lifetimes, to bridge the long lag times and lead times in climate, biological, and social dynamics.”
⁴

Fortunately for all of us, gamers actually have a head start on this mission.

Gamers have been mastering the art of planet craft for years. There’s actually a genre of computer games known as “god games”—world- and population-management simulations that give a single player the ability to shape the course of events on earth in dramatic ways, over lifetimes or longer.

As we’ve seen, Will Wright’s
The Sims
gives players godlike powers over the daily lives of individual people. Sid Meier’s
Civilization
challenges players to guide a civilization (such as the Aztecs, the Romans, the Americans, the Zulus) from the start of the Bronze Age, six thousand years ago, through the Space Age, or AD 2100. And Peter Molyneux’s
Black & White
invites players to govern the entire biome of a remote island, inspiring either joyful worship or terrified obedience in the island’s tribal population by performing a combination of benevolent and evil divine ecological interventions.

What all of these god games have in common is that they encourage players to practice the three skills that are critical for real planet craft: taking a long view, ecosystems thinking, and pilot experimentation.

Taking a long view
means working at scales far larger than we would ordinarily encounter in our day-to-day lives. Players of god games have to consider their moment-by-moment actions in the context of a very long future: an entire simulated human life, a single civilization’s rise and fall, or even the entire course of human history.

Ecosystems thinking
is a way of looking at the world as a complex web of interconnected, interdependent parts. A good ecosystems thinker will study and learn how to anticipate the ways in which changes to one part of an ecosystem will impact other parts—often in surprising and far-reaching ways.

Pilot experimentation
is the process of designing and running many small tests of different strategies and solutions in order to discover the best course of action to take. When you’ve successfully tested a strategy, you can scale up your efforts to make a bigger impact. Since god gamers want to maximize their success, they don’t just come up with one plan and stick to it. Instead, they carefully feel their way around the system, poking and prodding until they find the strategies that seem to reliably maximize success.

Taken together, these three ways of thinking and acting are exactly the kinds of effort Brand recommends in
Whole Earth Discipline
. Instead of seizing the day, he says, “Seize the century.”
⁵

He advises, “Participation has to be subtle and tentative, and then cumulating in the right direction. If we make the right moves at the right time, all may yet be well.”
⁶

 

 

OF COURSE,
we can’t actually use existing commercial computer games as test environments to solve the real problems we face. They radically simplify the forces at play in the complex ecosystems we live in. But as we try to develop systems for engaging massively many people in world-changing efforts, we can take an important cue from the most successful god games. Specifically, we can learn from their ability to change the way players think about the world, and their own powers within it.

Take, for example, the most epic god game yet designed—the universe simulation
Spore
, developed by Will Wright and produced by Maxis Software. Of all the god games to date,
Spore
is the most explicitly linked to the notion of planet craft—and the most intentionally focused on getting players to think of themselves as capable of changing the real world.

In
Spore
, players control the development of a unique species through five stages of evolution: from single-cell origins (stage one) into social, land-dwelling creatures (stage two), who form tribes (stage three), build technologically sophisticated civilizations (stage four), and ultimately venture off into intergalactic space exploration (stage five). Each stage zooms out to give the player control over a more complex system. Players advance from manipulating cellular DNA to increasing their creature’s intelligent behaviors; from organizing a division of labor in their tribe to growing a global economy; from advancing national interests through trade, military action, or spiritual outreach to colonizing other planets and transforming them into inhabitable ecosystems. They can spend as much time as they want in any stage, piloting different strategies for improving their species and transforming the environment.

The game is fun and rewarding to play, but it’s meant to accomplish more than just relieving boredom or making us happy. As Wright has said on numerous occasions, the game is meant to spark a sense of
creative capability
among players, and to inspire them to adopt the kind of long-term, planetary outlook that can save the real world.

Consider this exchange, which occurred shortly after the 2008 release of
Spore
, when the popular science magazine
Seed
hosted a public salon between Wright and Jill Tarter, a noted astrobiologist. The topic of the salon: how games like
Spore
are preparing young people to take a more active role in reimagining the real world.

Why does Wright believe that augmenting our natural capacity for imagination is so important at this precise moment in human history? It’s a matter of survival, pure and simple.

The name
Spore
is itself an important clue: the definition of a spore, in biology, is “a reproductive structure that is adapted for dispersal and surviving for extended periods of time in unfavorable conditions.”
⁸
It’s a perfect metaphor for the present circumstances of the human race.

We have collectively entered into what is all but certain to be a time of increasingly unfavorable planetary conditions, largely of our own making—an unstable climate, extreme weather, and an increasingly depleted environment. We need to adapt for survival. We need to imagine planetary-scale solutions and disperse them as far and wide as possible.

We need to become like spores ourselves.

And there’s an explicit call to action to do so, for players who complete all five stages of the game successfully.
Spore
has what game developers call a “primary win condition”: a supergoal that represents the ultimate achievement in the game. The primary win condition in
Spore
is to develop your single-cell creature into such a successful intergalactic space-faring civilization that it eventually reaches one galactic destination in particular: a super-massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

Players who reach the black hole receive a “staff of life,” which allows them to transform any planet in the
Spore
galaxy into a vibrant, diverse ecosystem: teeming with plants and creatures of all kinds, with breathable atmosphere, sustainable food webs, and plentiful water supply. (No wonder players also refer to it as the “Genesis device.”)

The staff of life is a shortcut to making an otherwise uninhabitable planet inhabitable. Along with the staff of life, players receive a special message and mission:

Sol
is Latin for “sun,” and so the
Spore
community has translated this final message from the game as a playful imperative to remake our own Earth—which is, of course, the third rock from our sun.

In the end, a win in
Spore
is a push back to the real world. Players are told, “Your gameplay has prepared you to become a real creator and protector of life on Earth.” Not by making them an expert in geoengineering, atmospheric science, or ecological planning, certainly, but rather by creating the seed of planetary creativity and activism. As Wright said at the
Seed
salon:

We can break free of the cognitive chains of short-term isolated thinking, with games that direct our collective attention to the future and challenge us to take a global perspective.

GOD GAMES LIKE
Spore
have gotten us successfully started on this journey. Now a different genre of games can get us where we need to go: massively multiplayer forecasting games, or
forecasting games
for short.

Forecasting games combine collective intelligence with planetary-scale simulation. They ask players to reimagine and reinvent the way we feed ourselves, the way we transport ourselves, the way we get water, the way we design cities, the way we manufacture everything, the way we power our lives. They’re designed to create diverse communities capable of investigating the long-term challenges we face, propose imaginative solutions, and coordinate our efforts to start putting our best ideas into action at the planetary scale.

It’s a process I call
massively multiplayer foresight
. And future-forecasting games are the perfect tool for helping as many people participate in the process as possible.
⁹

Which brings us to our final fix for reality:

How exactly does massively multiplayer foresight work? The best way to understand the process is to start with the project that inspired the forecasting game genre.

In April 2007, the world ran out of oil.

It didn’t run completely out of oil—it simply ran out of
enough
oil. The daily demand for oil worldwide began to outpace our daily production capacity. Shortages broke out, reserves were tapped, and yet the gap between global supply and demand grew wider.

The United States was among the hardest countries hit. During the darkest days of the crisis, as many as 22 percent of Americans were unable to get access to gas, while one in ten U.S. companies buckled under the strain of higher fuel costs and diminished operating capacity.

Two main strategies emerged to deal with the oil crisis.

We could collectively reduce our daily demand for petroleum in order to create equilibrium with the available supply.

Or we could compete even more aggressively for the available oil—with our own individual neighbors, with other companies, with other states, and with other countries.