The Challenge

How can we utilize multi-user computer games to stimulate players to care for the environment, with a focus on radical alternatives to current habits and practices?

Be a Tree & EcoReality

The workshop `info-eco education' worked on the design of two learning environments in which the virtual and the physical/social realities are integrated. One learning environment is for children, one for an 18+ audience. In both environments, a player's actions have consequences. A better understanding (gained in a playful way) of the relationships between actions and consequences may ultimately lead to an increased awareness of the player's responsibilities in the real world.

Be a Tree

The learning environment for little children , 5 to 7-year-olds, is called "Be a Tree". In a playful manner, awareness of the interdependency of all beings is heightened.

By playing inside the virtual world of Be a Tree, children enter a simulation of a natural environment, in this case a park, where they can look around, play and identify with all living things and inanimate objects. They experience what it's like to be a rock, a tree, a bird, a dog etc.

For instance, once the child has `experienced' a tree in the virtual environment, the tree invites the child to go out and find a tree and see and feel and smell what a real tree is like. The tree says: 'Be a tree!". In linking the virtual to the natural world, the child's appreciation of nature may be strengthened.

EcoReality

The other learning environment is called EcoReality. It is a multi-user simulation game for the Web. The game is based on the idea of 'ecospace'. Ecospace is the amount of energy and other natural and social resources available to individual players. In this game, a certain amount of ecospace is allocated to you. Your aim is to minimize your ecospace and to be as small a burden on the environment as possible. By your own actions, you can increase or decrease it. When you take the wrong decisions, it will expand.

The metaphor for ecospace is your own living environment -- your own home. In the beginning of the game, you have to create your own home by dragging in material things and nonmaterial values. Then the game starts. You answer real life questions ("Where are you going for holidays?", "What clothes did you buy today?", etc.). Obviously, there are serious consequences if you have created a home with 50 cats or if you have taken 20 children.

By literally zooming out from your own home/ecospace, you see yourself connected to other players: your actions may affect their worlds and vice-versa. You can communicate with them. You have to take individual as well as joint decisions. The idea behind this is that the ecospaces are connected through the actions and decisions of the players: when I use more water or oxygen then allocated to me there is less for the others; when I use less resources than allocated, I can start trading... By getting involved in the game, you shape and create your own biography.

In EcoReality, you don't know whether your decisions are wrong or right, because there is no immediate feedback. The game compresses time to show the actors what the consequences of their individual and mutual actions are from the perspective of a longer time horizon. The game is meant to create awareness by making explicit the assumptions on which we take decisions and anticipate consequences.

The mechanisms evoked by the two learning environments that are decribed here are based on the following feedback process: The perception of the environment provokes action. Actions have consequences, on which you have to reflect to become aware of what the impact is of your actions. This awareness will influence your further perception. So hopefully the Doors of Perception will lead to the Doors of Awareness.

Perception -> Actions -> Consequences -> Reflection -> Awareness -> Perception -> etc.

Participants

Jane Clark Chermayeff, President, Jane Clark Chermayeff Ass., USA

Uri Ashano, Student, Utrecht School of the Arts, The Netherlands

Sally Beardsley, Graphic Designer, Sally Beardsley Design, Denmark

Maurits Butter, Policy Official, Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, Directorate-General for Environmental Management, The Netherlands

Coco Conn, Director of SIGKIDS production Lab, USA

Peter Hesseldahl, Journalist, TV-2, Denmark

Donald Homuth, President, Global Area Network Ltd., USA

Apurva Joshi, Research Associate, Indian Institute of Technology, India

Catja Klabbers, Comprimo, The Netherlands

Jan Klabbers, Managing Director KMPC, The Netherlands (moderator)

Hester Lenstra, Lecturer Typography, Koninklijke Akademie, The Netherlands

Jurrienne Ossewold, Utrecht School of the Arts, The Netherlands

Michael Polman, Director, Antenna, The Netherlands

Heleen van der Sanden, Graphic designer, Bijeen, The Netherlands

Payson Stevens, President, InterNetwork Media, USA John Verheyden, Co-ordinator, Stichting MOOI, The Netherlands

Philip White, Ecological Design Engineer, Philips Corporate Design, The Netherlands

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