This sounds cool as hell!! I love the display concept art. And I especially appreciate that there’s an option for staying at “home base” in the game - one of my first thoughts at the top of the article was “oh, I wouldn’t be able to do something like this because of my mobility limitations,” at which point I was proven wrong XD
On one hand I really like the idea, gamification of solarpunk could really propel things (though could also make people dismissive of it being only a game, beware), but on the other hand the custom extra tools required provide a higher barrier to entry, and extra e-waste if not handled properly (though apart from a 3d printed cover they seem like some raspi/arduino/similar programmable thing with some semi-standard attachments, so that may be pretty okay.
Building on what you said about it being “only a game” - I’m shocked sometimes by how often people are able to decouple fictional experiences with their real life… for example, one of the core messages of Subnautica is working with the environment rather than bending it to your will, and that was extremely impactful for me. Playing that game made me think so much about our own environment and my place in it (and still does). But my friend played it and his takeaway was “fun fish game” and nothing else.
Or like how right-wingers love Superman for some reason.
I don’t know how we combat this. Fiction and other mediums like art, aesthetic, style, etc offer an easy gateway into the world of solar punk, but how do we encourage people to actually… move through that gateway instead of just staying at the entrance?
I think it’s easy to forget that we are all biased and when jumping to one conclusion is easy for us, another may be easy for someone else.
My 2.5 year old sometimes watches this kid show “Bing”, and it really just spells out the moral of the story at the end, maybe “grown up” media should do that more too? Don’t expect your audience to just know what comes naturally to you, tell them.
I know this goes against the core “show, don’t tell” principle of writing a good story, but maybe we can do show and tell?
(And I say we collectively while I’ve never created anything with a message 😅)
An interesting philosophical insight is that we do not live inside reality, we live in the model of reality we create with our senses, our mind and… our culture, which video games are part of.
The bleu qualia of the sky is a construction of your mind. The Earth as a planet is something you know but you did not experience directly. Same for the pain of others or neurodiversity. Countries you have never been to occupy a similar place as fictional places in your mind. Normal people sort these things well into “existing” and “fiction” but similar mechanisms exist.
Fill this place of examples of criminality and self-centered egoism, and it brings a vision of the world. Fill it with benevolence and empathy and you get a different one.
It leads to very concrete consequences, like the strategy people would choose in a blind prisoner’s dilemma game.
but how do we encourage people to actually… move through that gateway instead of just staying at the entrance?
You empower them with tools. When I gave someone a cheap servo, a reaction I got was “Hey, it sounds like the robot in that movie”. And there, you realize that the components in that box can be robots.
Games like minecraft or Stardew Valley give a notion of how you can change a place. Or destroy a biome.
I’m going to GenCon in a couple of weeks. This sort of event would be amazing.
