VIV GAMES is Live!
I've been promising some big announcements. Here's the first one: a new way to fund the restoration of forests, mangroves, and other natural systems around the world.
I’ve been working with a team of talented designers and specialists on a way to make gamers into heroes in real life. We’re coming out of stealth mode and need your help boosting our first Kickstarter campaign.
Uniting Two Worlds
VIV is building a bridge between two seemingly incompatible worlds. In one realm, you’re a hero engaged in epic quests to save the world—and you can do it! In online games, you’ve got agency, power, and the ability to instill hope in those around you.
In the other realm, you’re watching a slow catastrophe unfold all around you, with seemingly no way to stop it. Habitat loss, sea-level rise, wildfires, and extinction are raging across the real world. Agency, power, and hope seem impossible here.
What if there was a way to bring some of your power from the online world to help the natural one? There is a way, and VIV is pioneering it.
What We’re Doing
VIV is focused on habitat restoration and rewilding projects at a global level, but there are a lot of other benefits we can bring and a lot that we’re planning to do. Our funding model is deceptively simple, but it requires a team with connections and experience in diverse areas, from satellite monitoring to rights-of-nature law to product and process design and the economics of wilderness trusts. We have that team and are uniquely positioned to connect gamers’ actions to actual boots-on-the-ground work.
Why It’ll Work
Saving the world is going to cost money. But did you know that global video game revenues are now above $200 billion per year? According to our research, 83% of Internet users play video games (60% of the population in America), and out of 3 billion gamers, 1.7 billion play mobile games. Many of those games permit in-game purchases of character skins, DLCs and special items.
At the same time, 89% of young people say they are concerned about the state of the natural world and want to do something about it. They’re just not sure how.
VIV Games is going to give them and you the power to change the world for the better without having to do anything new. Just keep playing, and watch out for VIV items, events, and skins along the way. When you buy a VIV item, some of the revenue goes to a carefully audited natural restoration program.
Part of the VIV platform is a physical monitoring system (initially satellite-based) that objectively verifies the success of the regrowth you’re funding. This system lets us build a virtuous feedback loop: you play, you win, and just as you can mark your progress in the online world, you can also check your progress in improving the health of the natural world.
You play, you win, you save the world. It’s that simple.
We Win if We Go Viral
The current Kickstarter campaign is just the start; we intend to improve our monitoring systems, engage with more stakeholders (particularly indigenous land- and water-protectors), and expand from our initial set of games and items.
For any of this to happen, this campaign has to go viral.
Please visit the campaign page and contribute if you can. If you can’t contribute, at least send the link to any people or groups you know who want to take practical action against the specific problems we face. A lot of us are concerned with deforestation, wildfires, coral die-offs, and the decline in pollinator populations but are fed up with vague commitments to ‘helping the environment.’ If we can bring VIV’s process fully online, we will be able to apply funds to real projects directly.
Personally, this project is where I put my money where my mouth is. I can talk all day about speculative design and reframing worldwide issues, but what counts is action. In How to Save the Metaverse (and Why), I said:
Instead of [the Metaverse] being an exit, an escape from this world, we [should] 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.
VIV takes this idea from theory to practice. We have a historic opportunity to use the energy and optimism of the global gaming community to fix real-world problems. This Kickstarter may be a modest start, but it will put VIV on its feet, and we already know where we’re going from there.