2020

It is 6am Monday 30th of march 2020 I am lying in bed thinking about the

day ahead when my wearables on the bedside table buzz, I fumble them on and
answer,

''Mornin' Kim speaking''

There is an odd pause like a long distance connection and then I'm looking at a 3d icon of a face floating a metre in the air above me.It is Alchemy, the call is going out Tokyo's food situation has gone

critical, I am needed on the ground. So I'd best get out of bed, on the way to the shower I'm parseing flight

timetables and it seems I have a little time, the first plane I can be on departs in six hours. I nearly shower with my AR goggles on, catch myself in time, it’s an expensive mistake you only make once.

At the time I had been feeling pessimistic about humanities future, things were looking pretty grim, Copenhagen had just happened with little positive outcome. Denialists and big corporations were spreading disinformation and swaying the populace from decisive action on emissions.

I made art, still do. I got into making games about 7 years ago now, just as AR hit in a big way. It changed everything in a way, when you wore AR goggles for the first time, saw reality annotated, cross-referenced, it felt like telepathy, like something out of science fiction, not really possible. Augmented Reality, to start with it was as simple as this thin extra layer of information about the world. Then communication opened up and you could have a conversation with a friend on the other side of the world and sit in the same
room as them, graphics were not so crash hot to begin with, they improved fast, now it feels like you can touch them, hell with haptics, you can.

Then artists started using it, just as Gibson and Stross so accurately predicted, the everyday world became transformed a playground for the imagination. Giant surreal installations replacing graffiti in the urban wild, invisible to the naked eye.

Games pushed the tech to the next level though, they re-skinned reality into a fantasy wonderland and this is where things changed, a few clever people put this energy to work. They made living sustainably exciting, part of the game, they rewarded XP and achievements for it and suddenly seemingly overnight
millions of people had changed their lifestyles for fun, not guilt or ethics but pleasure. All this harnessed energy brought us back from the brink as a civilization.

It’s not like their aren’t still problems, but we have a couple of the big ones curbed, deforestation, overfishing, emissions, urban sprawl, all of these issues were tackled both directly and indirectly by people playing games. It would have seemed ridiculous to me a decade ago.

This is what I do now. I make beautiful imaginary things for people to play with. The real trick is that while people play with them, they benefit, and the community benefits.

So I am on my way to Tokyo to help starving people play.