If Transition were as Popular as Online Games

Imagine if Transition initiatives had the kind of energy put into them that online games do. We'd accelerate transition awesomely.

The numbers for involvement, and that's passionate eye-popping engagement, not checking a box on a screen, are astonishing to me (a non-gamer until very recently). Take just one of the more popular role playing games, World of Warcraft. It has 11.5 paid subscribers who play about 210 million hours / week. Since the game was initiated in 2004 people have played about 50 billion hours with sweat pouring off them from positive stress, trying to – succeeding at – improving the skill and powers of their online avatar (their representative in the online world).

Fifty billion hours? Even the fact that WoW knows exactly, exactly, how many hours have been spent is telling. How many hours have been spent on Ttransition initiatives? There's no way of knowing at all, but I'm sure, and I'm sure you'll agree it's way way less than 50 billion. And if all online games were counted the number would doubtless be somewhere over a trillion (of course this is over more years than transition).

World of Warcraft and many other role playing games are in the business of saving the world in one form another, an epic adventure, just as, in its modest way, Transition is. I've been reading about games lately in a wonderful book by Jane McGonigal called Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She's a young game developer who wrote her Ph. D thesis on games. You can watch her TED talk or check out her website.

In the book she says that a game has four essential characteristics. It's a natural to wonder if they can't be used to make Transition have more of the appeal of a game. I think they can, but it's not as simple as flipping a switch. There's something powerful in the ways that games can be used to influence reality, and many game developers are acutely aware of this. For example, development labs look like psychology labs with testing on just what positive emotions can be most directly elicited.

The four characteristics or a game are: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. Let's look at them in turn with a few thoughts as to how Transition might start to share some of the game star status.

A Goal

A game goal is irrefutably concrete and directly visible. Get that ball over that line, put the puck in the net, get the sword from the stone of Alcazar and bring it to Carlingwood in time for Christmas. You get the idea. It's done or not done. And when it's done you get a reward of some kind, a point up on the board, a badge / new power for your avatar. Transition's goals are less clear. They often require us to step forward and make the goal itself, with no clear acknowledgement when that's done.

There's nothing that means that Transition's goals have to be invented by each initiative. The goals themselves could be a collaborative project that Transitioners everywhere work toward.

Feedback System

A game needs to show you how you're doing, and the sooner the better. In hockey, having the puck and being close to the other team's net show you where you are. Online games excel at this. They might have instant points for killing something, a complex grading system for your avatar based on what you've accomplished (including your ability to cooperate with others in joint “raids” or whatever); in online games the avatar looks different as you “level up”, and full and complete stats are instantly available to all on what you've done.

Transition has a weak feedback system, based on background noticing on who's doing what. There could be, for example, a series of steps within each project and a monthly recognition of the project that accomplished more of their steps. Or perhaps an annual goal for each project with progress visually there on each site.

If this evolved across the Transition network so much the better. “Epic” scales rule.

Rules

In games, the essence is that anyone can pick up the ball and go all the way. You can't mess with the rules of Scrabble: either it's a word or it isn't; a letter has the value it has and that's it. The rules rule.

In human organizations, human group psychology rules which means that unconscious power dynamics rule. In other words we start off following rules we don't know we're following, rules we mistake for reality.

For most of us that means power in an organization -  or a world -  comes from the top down. In Transition, the rules for initiating and taking responsibility for projects need to be made explicit and clear, important given human's exquisite sensitivity to “who's in charge here” thinking and our unwillingness to break social mores.

It's precisely because so few know how to break with the prevailing thought process that we humans pretend there's no need for Transition, despite an avalanche of information to the contrary. Our psychology rules.  It's a human reality that we need express permission / invitation to take leadership and ownership of a process, including the Transition process. The default is that we defer and only unusually brave souls or accidental insiders, the friends of leaders, take ownership for parts of the Transition process.

Voluntary Participation

The high rates of game participation flip the thinking that there's not enough involvement. The question is, do we respect how human's think and feel, and work with their psychology, inspiring them to play this game? People are willing tot play. The question is more, are we willing to invite them into a game and show them how to play?

Do All in Fun, "Comrade!"

The idea of the end of growth changes everything about our world. None of us wants to hear that – none of us want to know that – but for me it's become a reality. For you too? I'm not going to make the case here. Richard Heinberg's book The End of Growth does that powerfully but doubtless you've been following growth's progress and have made up your own mind. I'm assuming the end of growth to be true in this post. This means that our economy is never going to get back to material growth; there can be great advances in life and culture but we'll have much less energy to do it with. That fact changes everything.

If that's true, how do we come to grips with a phenomenon like this? With a lot of hard work, thought, grieving, caring and building perhaps. But at the risk of being glib, I'll outline a quick and dirty path for responding to the challenge of “the end of growth”, roughly the one I'm following myself. There can be many formulations but these are mine today.

My mini-map consists of three steps: deep agreement that the end of growth is indeed true, imagining a future we want that takes this into account, and taking steps to create it. Deep Agreement, Imagine Future, Create. First letters come down to DAIFC . . . “Do all in fun, comrade”. 

Here's what that looks like!

Deep agreement

We don't really believe that the end of growth is coming, even if we do. That's because this notion goes up against some very strong conditioning that we all have. I mean, everyone and everything around us shouts that the institutions and dynamics around us are going to continue on their present path. So we see one thing, and the world reflects back another, or at least has a story about another, called Business as Usual.

This dissonance between the two sets up a lot of conflict within us that requires considerable personal skills and smarts of a kind that aren't taught in schools and that are not usually talked about in fact To really believe in something different from consensus reality is stressful for everyone – it's no failing to fall into it. It's natural because the skill of thinking differently from the tribe isn't part of our evolutionary heritage. That's because most of that has been lived in tribal situations in which conformity to the group's trumped individualization. That was appropriate then. Unfortunately, the end of growth, material growth, means that we've got to grow ourselves and make room for what we know to be true. Deep agreement, in other words, of the broad notion that smaller and more local is coming and coming to us. I don't believe it's possible or necessary to know the details of when specific changes are going to happen. The essential point is that we ignore the end of growth at our peril.

Imagine a Future you want

Deep Agreement is the least risky of the three steps in my map. The next, and the next riskiest is to Imagine a Future we want., Really, how would you like it to be? Not what do you fear (there's a place for that but it's not here), but what do you want? It's an act of courage to imagine what we want, to imagine it in color and drama, with all the excitement that we save for our vacation. To allow ourselves to invest in that future imaginatively is to take a powerful step toward its accomplishment. That's part of what makes it risky.

The method that works for me, is really no method. I get out paper and coloured pens and start to draw and create a map with words and arrows and super-rough sketches. I just put in all the parts I want, things that actually please me that reflect a down-sized life, things that have some juice for me, not just things that I think would be good for me. As someone with a strong altruistic streak I have to watch my tendency to do “good” rather than what actually turns my crank.

Whether it's just with pencil or pen, with colourjled markers, with big scrapbook paper or printer paper, I get something down that's got some juice for me. Some people have never given themselves the gift of allowing the dream to get out there in front of them, on a piece of paper. It's not hard and it's fun.

Create

The third component is Creation, to actually start doing something toward accomplishing some part of the picture. I take something small or big and get on it. I don't worry about whether what I want is realistic at this stage, because I know I often sell reality short on this one. This is a time of change and things that might have been impossible no longer are. In a time of endings there's extra room for new beginnings. Creating something just because you like it is a radical act that, in my experience, has unpredicable consequences. It creates more stuff.

In some way or another it helps to keep track of the progress I'm making. For example, if it's write 1000 words every day for a month, then I might make a little pie chart up with the days of the month on it, and color them in each day. Noticing change creates more change..

Are my three steps too simple? Probably, but they are a start, they will get things moving in the direction that supports your thriving at the end of growth. Other skills will become evident too, just one of which I'll mention now.

It's a big help to have local support, a person or persons who share the view that change is coming and will hear your progress or at least be in tune with it, witnesses to it. You can give them the same “love”. A small group would be the best thing because it effectively becomes a mini-culture for the change you want.

There are other skills and vast learnings along the way, for sure. But the important thing is to make some movement. It's not easy but actually easier than doing nothing. And fun!

Do all in fun, comrade!