CHALLENGE: Minecraft Sustainable World Games

Once upon a time, some kids played the Earth Charter Game and said, Hey this could be a Minecraft game!

Gwen and Jim Thompson helped them to create their own Earth Charter Game board in Minecraft. I was there when they had coded enough of it to explore their new world in Creative, with the Ocean of Lava and Obsidian to make things pretty exciting.

We’re ready for the 2021 iteration of the Earth Charter Game in Minecraft. It’s a race against time! We can win — and we must!

The Minecraft version of the Earth Charter Game will help young people to play in a way that engages the whole family in the Sustainable World Games and the community-wide climate conversation-to-action program for youth, adults and elders. We start in the virtual world to inspire real-world action for a livable Earth.

In 2018 I took the Earth Charter Game to the VR for the Social Good class at the University of Florida. Team NerveGear worked on it for a few weeks and came up with a world where players could visit with Pacha, bounce around on circles just like on the game board, and even had a Main Stage that raised up and showed a video of Pacha saying, “Let’s plant a billion trees!”

The next semester, another team created a game to show the long-term effects of planting trees today. The player plants as many trees as possible, then time travels to the year 2050 to see what the world looks like. Depending on the number of trees planted, the world in 2050 is either green and flourishing or gray and dismal.

If you doubt that playing the game on a screen is going to help make a better future, listen to Jane McGonigal’s argument from her 2010 TED Talk. (This inspired me to delve into the world of Minecraft, where so many kids love to spend their time.)

We’re ready for the 2021 iteration of the Earth Charter Game in Minecraft. It’s a race against time! We can win — and we must!