Games Develop Survival Skills   

  by josuter                 

In a recent interview, Michael Brandon Daugherty (My Father Gave Me Ireland) drew a stark contrast between the wealth of Westchester County in NY and the poverty of nearby Orange County, a contrast repeated many times over in other parts of modern America.  Whether political leaders are aware of the problem and able to make course corrections is still a question.  A universal basic income may be a temporary bridge but long term health of our society will require thinking that is both creative and yet reflect fundamental values. 

Meanwhile, children in both counties are out playing games.  Soccer, baseball, basketball, skip rope, whatever.  Adults in these recession-worn areas will stay indoors, pull down the shades and not talk to neighbors when instead they could be learning something from what their children do naturally.  In many parts of the world games actually help develop survival skills.  In Kenya, distance running to catch food has made them into great runners.  Alaskans can operate a sled-dog team probably better than people from Kenya.  In many coastal regions of the world, swimming is a survival skill made into a sport.  Games tune our skills, focus attention, and just as important, get us to interact with others in a relatively low-risk environment.  We play games both for ourselves and for survival of the group.  

One thing missing during this contemporary period of re-adjustment is the ability to organize.   A business can easily organize because the lines of authority and salary are clear. But if the money stops, that business will collapse like a Marionette doll.  Games can also benefit from money spent up front, but once started they can be played over and over again just for the fun and challenge.   

For businesses that produce products to ship overseas, localisglobal, but games too can happen on an international level.  How?  Pick a country, maybe any country in the path of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Using games as a tool to find and move useful information, focus many people on that target country to push those people into becoming self-sufficient.  Then they won’t need help from China.  Throw a wrench in the China expansion machine.  This can be done without occupation of that country.  The game process can be a hybrid of online and face-to-face.  A loose mapping of one town in the US with one town in the target country will provide a division of labor. 

Goals for each game can revolve around some aspect of stability starting with the most basic needs, pushing ideas and information to make the target country self-sustaining.  Local organizers in the US may want to create a prize to start the process and attract a wider pool of players.  The game must provide real competition to engage the players and create their own panel of judges for a sense of fairness.  Moderators and sponsors can provide a general direction by helping to formulate of a series of discussion questions but some games may start on their own.  Having a time limit helps make the process become more efficient.

Communication technology and social media may play a part for widening rifts among natural allies, but so do special interest groups that are close to government.   With games we can use the power of connectivity for problem solving in the real world.  Put boomers and millennials on the same team to extract wisdom from the boomers and new ideas from the millennials.  Start a game using players from the US, then mix in players from the target country later on.  Leadership-to-leadership level initiatives are often too slow and tend to create openings for corruption.  Aim instead at creating a few small teams from a cross section of society.  

Finding a good starting question may seem like a challenge but in practice is not that hard.  Public speakers often pose big questions, to which, of course, they always have an answer.  This is the format for new authors on book tours and is a good way to sell books, but it is not necessarily a learning structure.  If the question is too big, break it down into smaller ones.  Questions of the right size will tend to lead to action.   Games can help to formulate or discover questions of the right size. 

Why would anyone play a game with the object of pushing others up the hill to improve their lot? For the fun and challenge.  Games can start in conservative towns or left wing localities if people are able to imagine themselves as players.  Playing to show solutions to other people in some other location can bring back ideas that benefit one’s own community.  Games can be played for underperforming schools, healthcare, community projects, or transportation, wherever there are basic problems to solve. 

The Indonesian tsunami in 2004 killed more than 220,000 people but at least one village survived because they had a story that said “when the water goes rapidly out to sea, you must immediately run to the hills.”   One does not have to understand the story to make use of it, though in this case the reason immediately becomes clear.   

More often the wisdom must be teased out.  As a social group reacting to the current pandemic, we look pretty slow.  Just as with cigarettes and lung disease, few people pay attention to necessary details unless a friend or family member is involved. This makes response to slow moving changes such as pandemics a product of group intelligence as much as individual intelligence.  

Knowledge of past pandemics is contained within stories of history. It may be useful to periodically take a story off the shelf, dust it off and take it for a test drive.  Does the story mask a fear or have a hidden agenda?  Is it still relevant or does it need modification?  Extracting the wisdom of stories is a group exercise since these stories must be separated from alternative stories.  Sometimes competition and games may be the only way to help us find the strong and weak points.   

If democracy is just another way to divide the spoils, then we have no larger mission and must simply wait in line.   But if we can re-learn the impatience of children, then we may see opportunities to play, creating games that can be used to push others and ourselves uphill toward a more sustainable future.