Play. Win. Save the World
I co-founded VIV Games to fund real-world nature restoration projects with micro-donations inside games
If we’re going to be unapocalyptic we have to turn theory into practice.
The challenges of the ‘polycrisis’ can seem overwhelming, but humanity hasn’t even begun to tap into our vast potential for collective action. I’m doing something about this by co-founding a company to fund solutions to our crises. You can help.
I recently wrote a post called How to Save the Metaverse (and Why) and said:
This is how we save the Metaverse: we change one foundational metaphor. Instead of it being an exit, an escape from this world, we design it as a place where our real-world problems still exist but are transformed into entities on a human scale, that we can understand better cognitively, and cope with better both practically and emotionally. Make the Metaverse into a space we enter by choice to wrestle with our personal and collective demons, emboldened and assisted by companions both human and AI.
VIV Games was founded to do just this. VIV’s business plan is simple: give some of the 3 billion people who play digital games daily an option to make in-game purchases that are both cool and fun, and that fund real-world projects such as reforestation, rewilding, mangrove restoration, and more.
You play your favorite games. You have fun, and in having fun you help save the world.
But wait! you say. Isn’t there some Calvinist rule that states we can only solve deeply serious problems by becoming deeply serious ourselves? By sacrificing our pleasures? Prostrating ourselves before the idol of Austerity? Lowering our eyes from the pursuit of happiness and donning the drab uniform of the janitors of Modernism?
No. No there is not.
The $230 billion gaming industry is largely paid for by people who are deeply concerned about the state of the planet. VIV’s done our research and we know gamers want to help. They just don’t know how to do it by gaming. VIV does.
Our value proposition is that you can help save the world by having fun.
In diving into beautiful virtual worlds, achieving epic online wins, and even just quietly retreating from the stress of the day, your leisure time can be made into the very instrument of nature’s restoration.
Because of the inertia of this paradigm shift—and the potential size of the market—we’re approaching funding from several directions. You can help by backing our Kickstarter campaign (yes, this is Round 2; we have refined and improved it). Hurry on over to Gamers Save the World 2.0 — Roblox, LoL, Minecraft, and pledge now. Tell your friends about it. We want this campaign to go viral.
My personal goal is to flip the narrative about our planetary crisis—from emergency, to opportunity. Our generation has the chance to make the greatest epic win in history. To literally save the Earth, not by bearing the burden of some new asceticism, but by unleashing our creativity and sense of fun. VIV gives you a way to do that, initially through a simple model based on engaging artists to create unique character skins for a select set of games; once we get this particular project rolling, we have much bigger plans that I can’t talk about yet.
We’ve started the game. It’s your move.