14 June 2022. Nature | Games
Reimagining our relationship with nature. // Using games to imagine the future.
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1: Reimagining our relationship with nature
I was able to get to the Barbican’s Our Time On Earth exhibition in London recently, although this write up has been delayed by some difficulties extracting the photos from my phone. In summary, the curators commissioned provocative pieces from artists, designers, and activists on the theme of our relationship with the earth. Overall, it’s an impressive exhibition, even if I found the section that had some of the solutions a bit more mundane than the sections that raised questions.
The Imagine room asks us to “imagine that we’ve all shifted to embrace a non-human centred community”, which it does through Superflux’s dining table installation, ‘Refuge for Resistance’. Their description: “we wanted to give every species at the table the same level of love, care and attention that we give to ourselves—humans.” The table is set for a world in which all living creatures are considered equal.
(Superflux. Image: Andrew Curry).
There’s a window at the end of the table that includes a video installation that shows a rewilded city landscape in which different animals and other creatures emerge from the water and vanish again into the undergrowth.
(Superflux. Image: Andrew Curry).
Still in the Imagine section, we’re invited to imagine that “the future is indigenous”, a set of wall hangings created by Sônia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá, indigenous leaders in Brazil. Walking through this, it felt as if I were in a forest, with the hangings dropping down to the floor as I weaved between them.
One of the texts on the wall—by Célia Xakriabá—extended this invitation:
"We invite humanity to this collective task. To assume this commitment to reforest minds and hearts for the healing of the land, and to retake the relationship of the land as a relative; as a mother, as a grandmother, and not as a commodity."
—
(Source: Sônia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá. Image: Andrew Curry)
Their letter, ‘We Are The Earth’, written with Earthrise, is also part of the exhibition, and has been shared online by the Barbican.
Perhaps as the other half of this project, Liam Young invited us to imagine a world where ‘humans retreat’, to a single vast city, allowing nature to reclaim the rest of the planet. This was a kind of version of the world of EM Forster’s dystopian story ‘The Machine Stops’, perhaps—and Young helpfully provided data on what would happen in this ten billion person city.
(Source: Liam Young. Image: Andrew Curry)
His ‘imagination’ question:
"What if we reached a global consensus to retreat from our vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of Earth?"
It’s hard to be a fan of this idea, but I don’t think that that is the point.
Some of the Imagine section seemed less challenging. Imagine a world ‘where all clothing is biologically fabricated’, for example, doesn’t get us far unless we also unravel the absurd consumption levels of new clothing in the rich North. It’s one thing to demonstrate that mycelium can be used to produce substitutes for leather, but again pointless unless you ask about the status and purpose of the leather goods that mycelium is being used to replace.
One of the ‘imagine’ posters asked us to imagine a ‘relational economy’ built on connections and collaboration, and this a theme of much of the current thinking about a post-transition society. One of the things the mycelium leather exhibit said to me is that as a group of people brought up in the last accelerating stage of the growth mindset, we have real problems escaping from that mindset.
But I don’t want to end on a sour note. One of the last installations, by The Territorial Agency, showed digital technologies mapping ‘the sensible zone’—new terminology to me—which extends from 200 metres below to 200 metres above sea level. The information board underlined the importance of this zone:
This is the space where life processes regulate ocean, atmosphere and land to maintain Earth's habitability. Here, technology also has its most devastating impacts. The rapid growth of technology has caused huge disruption to the planet. Urbanisation, infrastructure, farming, fishing and extraction of fossil fuels have created a vast debris that interferes with Earth's self-regulating system.
But new mapping technologies allow us to track what’s going on in this zone. The images were stunning.
(Source: The Territorial Agency. Image: Andrew Curry)
2: Using games to imagine the future
The journalist Tim Harford has a review of the use of games to imagine alternative futures, prompted by a new book, Imaginable by the games designer and futurist Jane McGonigal. McGonigal is best known as the developer of the vast multi-player futures game Superstruct, which back in 2008 imagined a global pandemic.
McGonigal argues that games can teach us something about the future. She wouldn’t be the first person to believe that games offer important lessons about the world, as Jon Peterson attests in his meticulous history of war-games and role-playing games, Playing at the World.
Harford uses his article for a canter through the uses of gaming to imagine various futures and our responses to them. So following Peterson he traces the history of gaming, in particular war-gaming, through the Prussian military in the 19th century, to the US Naval War College in the 1920s and 1930s, to RAND in the post-war years. RAND in particular moved to the world of the soft simulation, in which players were able to do anything that was in keeping with the rules, their scope as actors, and their feasible resources. Referees arbitrated impact.
As the cold war strategist and Nobel laureate economist Thomas Schelling put it, open-ended games were valuable because “one thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him”. Such cold war simulation games prompted important realisations — for example, that there was no simple, direct, quick, tamper-proof way for Washington and Moscow to communicate.
The ‘hotline’ was only introduced after the missteps in the Cuba missile crisis had demonstrated the need for it. While Harford talks about ‘cold war games’, but doesn’t mention Kahn’s nuclear scenarios, which were in effect game-theoretic versions of nuclear war outcomes. Kahn had moved from RAND to set up his Hudson Institute.
The other benefit of games is that they help people to see things from other people’s viewpoints—the ‘gentle art of reperceiving’ as Shell’s Pierre Wack said of scenarios.
By their very design, such games tend to puncture groupthink. Somebody has the job of pretending to be the enemy, and will inevitably find something sneaky to attempt. The fundamental advantage seems to be in populating Schelling’s list of things that would never occur. You cannot draw up such a list, but you might play your way into it.
As someone who has designed and run a number of soft simulations, this is their biggest advantage. They reach into visceral areas in a way that more considered assessment of say, a set of scenarios, will not. You see how people might behave.
But as with all forms of futures work, it doesn’t help unless the learning is connected to some kind of decision—even if that decision is just to monitor new things or develop richer contingency responses. Thousands of people played Superstruct, but it seems unlikely that it changed the way we responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. The people who joined the game were disconnected from the places where pandemic planning is done.
Even when not disconnected, it doesn’t necessarily help. The US Naval War College had a wargame based in the Pacific called ‘Fleet Problem XIII’ that highlighted the vulnerability of US Pacific naval bases to attack from the west, but the Japanese attack still surprised Pearl Harbour.
Of course, as a futurist, I also need to take issue with hisheadline and other language about predicting the unpredictable”. Games never represent the future—but they can represent models of possible futures. Games are a way to construct models of the future, and we are in George Box land here, that all models are wrong but some are useful. Or as my sometime colleague Tamar Kasriel used to say at the end of her presentations, ‘it is more important to be ready than to be right’.
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