Gaming Sustainability

Collaboration, urgent optimism, committed focus - these are the skills and qualities needed in humans to solve sustainability’s biggest challenges and, as it turns out, also the most minor of missions belonging to Azeroth in the online video game “World of Warcraft.”

A massive multiplayer game where thousands of people play at any time, “World of Warcraft” requires at least five to 20 players for a single challenge. Why? James Gee, a professor at Arizona State University studying situated learning in games, says it’s because the problems in “World of Warcraft” are too complex for just one person to take on. “It’s an extremely complicated world,” Gee says. “Essentially, this game is controlling hundreds of variables that interact with each other statistically to give the outcomes of the decisions you make.” 

While game worlds such as Azeroth may be fictional, the real abilities of its eleven-million-plus community to band together and solve a relentless onslaught of problems are beginning to attract a growing number of researchers interested in how online games might be changing human behavior. But, what does this mean for sustainability? A small number of games recently created to engage players in earthly environments - worlds that lack sufficient supplies of water, oil and food - point to an inherent power online games have in the discourse of sustainability: virtual reality or, in sustainability’s case, virtual futurity.

In her 2010 TED Talk about the power of games to solve real-world problems, Jane McGonigal, a game designer, researcher and author of “Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,” says that if humans want to survive another century on Earth, we will need to start playing more games. In other words, if the role of sustainability is to plan for the future, then researchers like McGonigal believe that playing games - and designing specially tailored games for us to play -will help us better experience and co-design that future.

Having a hard time envisioning what an oil shortage would be like? Well, there’s a game for that. Created in 2007, in part by McGonigal, “World Without Oil” is a game that challenges its players to survive an oil shortage. The aim of the game is to blur the line between the real world and a virtual one where oil has become scarce. “The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it’s real and to live your real life as if we’ve run out of oil,” McGonigal says.

The game forces players to think about how their everyday actions are connected to a complex web of processes. In a world without oil, gamers are able to see firsthand scarcity’s rippling effects: impacts from the oil shortage extend beyond figuring out how to get to work and into more dicey areas such as food supply, where food transportation is affected by oil scarcity. The 1,700 gamers who signed up to play “World Without Oil” left in their wake blog posts, video posts and photos documenting their adventures and how their experiences have translated to their real-world lives.

In another game created by McGonigal at the Institute for the Future, a non-profit research center specializing in long-term forecasting, “SuperStruct” engaged 8,000 gamers over an eight-week period to come up with solutions to sustain human life on Earth. Under the fictional premise that humans had only 23 years left to live, the game’s players came up with 500 solutions for the human species to endure. When did games become so serious? Decades after the term “serious game” came into use, the Serious Game Initiative formed in 2002 to encourage the production of games that do more than entertain, but rather are intended to address issues with major policy or management implications.

It wasn’t until last year, though, that games began to really earn some cultural capital. In 2010, McGonigal’s “Evoke“ - a social network game to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to urgent social problems” - was commissioned by the World Bank Institute. And most recently, the academic journal Nature published its first paper co-authored by an online gaming community.

Studies show that gamers play for a variety of reasons and that “escapism” and “entertainment” often rank lower on the list than one might expect. Typically, there is not a lot of fun involved in scarcity and behavioral modification, two of sustainability’s greatest - and linked - challenges. Changing one’s mind and routines is no easy feat. It’s also notoriously easy for us as humans to shrug off the complexity and weight of our decisions, especially if we can’t see what is at stake. An inability to conceptualize scarcity might be as threatening as scarcity itself.

The future is hard to predict. And while the power of games as a social platform remains unclear, it’s easy to see that alternate game worlds will increasingly affect how humans participate and interact in the real world. How humans choose to respond to the development of virtual worlds could very well affect our chances of achieving an epic win in the real one.

Generation X Leaders

William Strauss and Neil Howe, coauthors of Generations, posit that each generation makes a unique bequest to those that follow and generally seeks to correct the excesses of the previous generation. They argue that the Baby Boomer excess is ideology and that the Generation X reaction to that excess involves an emphasis on pragmatism and effectiveness. Generation X - those born roughly in the 1960’s and 70’s - engender a deep admiration for their generational traits, particularly in the context of current challenges.

Future leaders in all spheres will have to contend with a world with finite limits, no easy answers and the sobering realization that we are facing significant, seemingly intractable problems on multiple fronts. Perhaps the biggest change from the past: leaders will have to listen and respond to diverse points of view. There will be no dominant voice. In this context, Gen X'ers will be the leaders we need. The experiences that shaped those who were teens in the late 70’s and 80’s, translate into valuable contemporary traits and perspectives:

· Their accelerated contact with the real world, for many through a "latch-key" childhood, has made them resourceful and hardworking. They meet their commitments and take employability seriously.
· Their distrust of institutions grew as they witnessed the lay-offs of the 80’s and has prompted them to value self-reliance. They have developed strong survival skills and the ability to handle whatever comes their way with resilience. X'ers instinctively maintain a well-nurtured portfolio of options and networks.
· A sense of alienation from their immediate surroundings as teens, coupled with rapidly expanding technology, has allowed they to look outward in ways no generation before could or did. They operate comfortably in a global and digital world. Many of they are avid adopters of the collaborative technology that promises to re-shape how we work and live.
· Their awareness of global issues was shaped in their youth, and they are richly multicultural. They bring a more unconscious acceptance of diversity than any preceding generation. Their formative years followed the civil rights advances of the 1960’s. High divorce rates during their youth meant they are the first generation to grow up with women in independent authority roles. They welcome the contributions of diverse individuals.
· Their preference for "alternative" and early experience in making their own way left them inclined to innovate. They tend to look for a different way forward. Their strongest arena of financial success as a generation has been their entrepreneurial achievements.
· Their skepticism and ability to isolate practical truths have resulted in rich humor and incisive perspective. They help us all redefine issues and question reality.
· Their childhood made them fiercely dedicated to being good parents, prompting them to raise important questions about the way we all balance work with commitments beyond the corporation.
· Their pragmatism has given them practical and value-oriented sensibilities that, will help them serve as effective stewards of both today's organizations and tomorrow's world.

The most difficult elements of their past may well be those that provide them with the strongest capabilities for today. They have traded the idealism of the Baby Boomer generation for realism, tempered by value-oriented sensibilities. At mid-life, they are well prepared to serve as pragmatic managers, applying toughness and resolution to defend society while safeguarding the interests of the young. They will force nations to produce more than they consume and fix the infrastructure.

In today's challenging world, their humor may be their most-valued asset. Czech leader Václav Havel said, "There are no exact guidelines. There are probably no guidelines at all. The only thing I can recommend at this stage is a sense of humor, an ability to see things in their ridiculous and absurd dimensions, to laugh at others and at ourselves, a sense of irony regarding everything that calls out for parody in this world." They help us step back…and remind us to laugh.

They will have the opportunity to change the corporate template and create organizations that are more conducive to their values. As leaders, they will be able to reshape the organizations they lead to make them better places for future generations and themselves; make them more humane, and break the cultural norms of corporate life - long hours, a focus on full-time work, heterogeneous perspectives and language of combat.

They will bring their desire to create better alternatives, including how to balance work with commitments beyond the corporation and finding meaning in work. Most importantly, their preference for the "alternative" and their inclination to innovate will allow them to look for a different way forward.

Reinventing Human Accomplishment

Gary Hamel, celebrated management thinker, makes the case for reinventing management for the 21st century. In this video essay, Hamel paints a vivid picture of what it means to build organizations that are fundamentally fit for the future - resilient, inventive, inspiring and accountable. Modern management is one of humanity’s most important inventions, Hamel argues. But it was developed more than a century ago to maximize standardization, specialization, hierarchy, control and shareholder interests. While that model delivered an immense contribution to global prosperity, the values driving our most powerful institutions are fundamentally at odds with those of this age. Zero-sum thinking, profit-obsession, power, conformance, control, hierarchy and obedience; don’t stand a chance against community, interdependence, freedom, flexibility, transparency, meritocracy and self-determination. 

Earthwatch

Occasionally, we encounter natural forces more powerful than ourselves, which cannot be ignored, like the recent Japanese tsunami and earthquake. We generally plug up our ears to hearing nature's calls, most of which are subtle and easily ignored. But the forces of nature want us to listen. By entering into the subtle conversation, natural forces can help us cope with the mess we've created; because urban people can't help but be disconnected from nature. For many, the environment isn't a real part of their daily lives, but something outside it, something experienced in a Discovery special. As an extreme example of this disconnect, some children don't know that food comes from soil.

Many urbanites see nature as a stock of resources to be converted to human purpose. Yet many indigenous people see nature as a living god; to be loved, worshipped and lived with. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that the Arctic is melting. Yet, the people who thought they could safely harness nuclear power were dumb enough to put the plants’ backup generators in the basements, vulnerable to the same tsunami that could knock out the plants. We need to evoke the primal creativity of wilderness now in society, to alter the self-destructive systems of business as usual, and bring abundance out of scarcity. Bringing the wild into our urban lives can put us in greater harmony with the natural world.

How do we break the spell of this cultural separation from the natural world? Pressing far past our edge could take us beyond safe urban locations, into the wilderness. We don't have to go that far to regain the connection, letting the wildness in can start by simply getting our hands in the dirt. While good ways to enhance our personal growth, how do these approaches help accelerate the evolution of our larger society; where rising human population and constantly increasing rates of growth meet limits to the Earth's finite resources? There are levers, or places within a complex system (such as a firm, a city, an economy, a living being or an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.

Part of the vision is to create systems that are both smaller and more complex. With constantly increasing use of resources no longer possible, a new paradigm based on maximum cycling and recycling of resources is the only sustainable course. Our economies are based on rapidly turning natural resources into consumer goods; and then quickly into trash, trucked and dumped at great cost. The alternative includes full product reuse and recycling; and the composting of all biodegradable waste, returning it to the soil. We need to take a risk, to go past the edge; to exercise the power that we already have in order to strengthen our capacity to be of service.