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Village the Game: Play the World of Social Enterprise
Challenges Entered:
Village is an online world and strategy game designed to get people addicted to third world development. Form a team, build sustainable enterprises that eradicate poverty, and discover the power you have to transform the real world.
Village the Game is a social enterprise simulator designed to raise awareness of brilliant solutions to extreme poverty. Muhammed Yunus won the Nobel prize for proving that banks can lend money to the extremely poor to start their own micro-enterprises and they will pay back their loans. Kickstart.org invented an affordable irrigation pump that has helped tens of thousands of farmers enter the middle class throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. At NextBillion.net there are thousands more documented brilliant solutions to poverty.
This begs the question, "With all these brilliant proven solutions why does poverty still exist?" The answer is "lack of awareness". These solutions have not spread to every possible corner of the Earth because the movement needs more changemakers.
Recruiting the necessary changemakers to reduce extreme poverty to nothing more than an exhibit at a history museum means inspiring investors to focus funds on companies designed to serve the poor. It means offering a platform for entrepreneurs to test drive new ventures in a simulated third world. It means networking the millions of existing changemakers to cross-pollinate solutions, form teams, and find new opportunities for collaboration. This source of inspiration, this simulation, this network of changemakers is Village the Game.
WHAT WE NEED:
Village has a lot of the needs of any startup plus a few things particular to our topic:
- Office space in Silicon Valley and in Los Angeles.
- A highly regarded board of advisors involved in sustainable development and game development.
- $3 million to develop Village from the small demo it is now to a full-fledged market release.
Location
Pasadena, CA
United States
See map: Google Maps
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Creative, meaningful, innovative
After considering all of the proposals, I was pleased to put Village The Game on my list of most innovative NetSquared projects.
I see a lot of buzzwords...
...but I need you to connect the dots here.
Is the game targeted to casual players-philanthropists (gamers play and donate to microlending programs), proto-activist-leaders (students modeling vaccination drives and signing up for the Peace Corps), local communities and entrepreneurs (farmers selling "MoneyMaker" pumps), or aid workers (HfH discovering new building tools)? If your position is that the targets are all of these, then you need to outline some very extensive explanations, because these are very different audiences with very different models.
For instance, for the player-philanthropists, how do you control which nonprofits or microlending programs appear in the games? Do the programs have to spend time/money creating this integration? How can players be sure what they encounter are the best programs and not just what happens to be in the game?
For proto-activist-leaders, why would student-researchers enter the game for modeling outbreaks rather than using the more extensive systems at the research institutions at which they originate? And if they did use it, what guarantee is there that it would be in any way accurate?
For local communities, where is the access point? Are shop-owners in Peru playing this game online? Why? And how do they know the products are actually worthwhile, and not the equivalent of Coca-Cola product placement in an action movie? What is the accountability structure for these communities?
For aid workers, why would they seek out solutions in a game designed by people outside of their field rather than relying on the vast stores of knowledge and experience built up through their own programs (HfH certainly has plenty)?
There's also a general sense of "rich white people saving the world" that I just find really disconcerting. Especially when you make declarations like "Village is the most important simulation game of human history." I don't see a lot of empowerment here, and only the barest (and nakedly capitalistic) sense of community-building, in the sense that any game attracts users who segment into affinity groups (cf. Second Life). At best I see a lot of objectification (does the Global North fail to eradicate poverty really because not enough computer models have been run?) and at worst I see exploitation.
I don't mean to sound overly harsh. There may be a lot more here that I'm not seeing -- like I said, I hope you'll connect a few of these dots, or at least provide some more evidence for your claims. But I sense an underlying theory of social change that I just find problematic in its uncritical use of global and economic privilege.
--ivan (quixotic1.com/Genocide Intervention Network)
Great Idea
Hey, Phil here- I just wanted to say I think this is a really cool idea. Sorry I missed your NetTuesday presentation (being in NY, it makes sense), but I think it's a neat idea. People would love to bring the simcity mentality to giving, and it seems like a great way to do it.