Christian McCrea's Blog – March 2010 Archive (11)

I'm in a province of France, in a village with friends. We've been working hard over the summer and are taking a week off to fix up a old farmhouse and restore the garden to its natural state - producing soft vegetables and furnishing the local town with enough orchard fruit - lemon, orange and pear.



My friends are a tiny circle of creative and politically minded people - game designers, curators, social workers, human rights lawyers.



Much of the food comes from the farm,… Continue

I want to share an excellent method for food sharing in social groups with very high nutrition-boosting and good food practices:





The Local Stock Exchange Party



Many people are switching to organic, or more ethically grown meat. But the most pressing ethic of meat consumption is the grotesque waste that goes along with the use of bones and organs. These parts of animals were used right up to the 1960s by common… Continue

Among the rarefied suburban cultures of the West, the food security problems are fairly h***genous - over-production of mass agricultural artifacts creates vast distortions in the markets for food. Over-zealous capitalism-promoting bodies forced much of the agricultural centres to move to export-focuses industries - and destroyed much of the real food production systems in the process. India was pressed (by foreign debt) to farm massive amounts of cash crops and the land available for millet,… Continue

I want to introduce to Evoke players the work of several groups concerning desert reclamation. Moses said "all deserts are man-made." This knowledge is part of our intellectual and social fabric but we have yet to fully realise that the huge challenges of the environment have a barometer in the growth of heavily salinated basins which contribute to worldwide desert growth. Deserts are not natural. They are man-made, or more precisely, life-made.



The United Nations Convention on… Continue

Food security. Water security. Education. All the things we know. But among these needs is also Justice. Justice is not retrospective. Justice is present. Justice means freedom from exploitation. If foreign investment has been proven to be largely exploitative, then the role of outside bodies has to be the alleviation of suffering that that exploitation generates. Then it has to be the examination of whether more investment is going to cause more suffering.



The key thing - the big… Continue

I have a lot of heroes who I follow and who I consider influential, but since my world in game design, I really focus on people who combine the world of politics with the world of game design. There are many ways in which they have been combined; Brody Condon and Anne-Marie Scheiner, Jane McGonigal (designer of this game), Katharine Neil, Eddo Stern, and many more.



The two I want to mention here are:



Gonzalo Frasca - he mixes business with politics by running… Continue

Hi, everyone. I've been really impressed by the quality of player made games here so I want to contribute my own. I think one of the best things EVOKE players can do is add to the fabric of the game by adding challenges and contributing to the knowledge base we're building.



The one thing missing from EVOKE is a discussion of the way the rich capitalise on the poor in new and devious ways. So lets use the power of the EVOKE network together!…



Continue

Agent Amanda Jeffreys has made an awesome player-generated game to help source more points - concentrating on explaing the evocation powers themselves. Thats great lateral thinking!



This blog post started it all: http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/game1-play-power-evocation



COURAGE PROFILE : GEORGE CAFFENTZIS



In George Caffentzis's "The… Continue

By the time ten years have passed, it will be commonplace for people to turn to games (both electronic and non-electronic) to think through problems and to model behaviours for themselves. We do it in schools, we do it in businesses, and now the third sector is closing in on the power of play. In ten years, I want to help on the front lines of a food crisis. In schools, as children suffer, I want to design games and keep their brains active while other agents deal with the crisis of supply. A… Continue

To "see and do the obvious" is the most powerful secret of social innovation.



Oftentimes, the most glaring problem in a complex situation is staring you right in

the face. In Africa, there are vast criminal and quasi-criminal

organisations that steal, kill, rape and pillage for money. They are

supported by Western organisations that use debt to harm African

economic models and supplant them with their own.



This is the obvious that we must… Continue

To "see and do the obvious" is the most powerful secret of social innovation.



Oftentimes, the most glaring problem in a complex situation is staring you right in the face. In Africa, there are vast criminal and quasi-criminal organisations that steal, kill, rape and pillage for money. They are supported by Western organisations that use debt to harm African economic models and supplant them with their own.



This is the obvious that we must see.



One immediate… Continue