Press Start: The Game to Save Life on Earth — Part I: The Beginning
Hello fellow humans!
We are Guardians of Earth. We are on a mission to save life on this planet, by empowering human potential to connect with and better understand nature through ethical technology. Soon our mission will be supercharged with the release of the Guardians of Earth game, the world’s first Play-Earn-Protect game.
How did we get here? Well, we are a bunch of people that love exploring the outdoors, mixing together technology in unexpected ways to discover new things and understand ancient yearnings :)
All the same though, no, we were not born feeling a deep sense of ‘oneness’ with our planetary home, seeing ‘nirvana’ in collaborative work or thinking of cosmic justice for one and all. Like all humans, we were simply born with an innate connection to nature (google ‘biophilia’). And, like in most humans, it dimmed and weakened over the years.
A few years ago things changed as we embarked on a journey to renew this connection. We were not trying to solve hard problems such as extinction of life on Earth or the need for a global species database to ensure humanity’s ability to survive is intact.
We had lesser ambitions — we wanted to figure out answers to simple questions such as: why do people like to be in nature? What do they like to do when surrounded by nature? Is there anything we can do to make the experience of being in nature richer and leave the participants feeling more aware of their environment? How can we share this rich experience?
Many trials and errors later a beautiful thing called QuestaGame was delivered in 2014.
It is a real-world mobile adventure game that takes players outdoors and engages them with their surroundings, observing, mapping and monitoring biodiversity. In fact, after Pokémon Go’s release (2016), QuestaGame (QG) was described as Pokémon Go meets David Attenborough.
Over time, we learnt there were two types of players that were attracted to QG:
- People who join QG to document biodiversity and discover that they are also having fun
- People who have fun playing QG and realise that they also care for biodiversity
Okay, we felt really good the way things were going. But soon we noticed something — it seemed like the desire to have fun, be in nature and document biodiversity seemed quite limited to certain parts of the world, usually the western world. Few seemed to join from biodiversity rich/GDP poor countries. Naturally, we were intrigued and did some more research. This is what we discovered:
- Everybody likes to be in nature
- Everybody wants to help biodiversity thrive
- Everybody wishes they can help map and document biodiversity to help save it, but….
The ‘but’ is a lack of time to observe/map biodiversity as it is time taken from making a living.
The ‘but’ is the lack of personal benefit in saving biodiversity as it is a resource that could provide livelihood.
The ‘but’ was usually (not always) the response of someone living in the developing world.
So what can we do to make this ‘but’ disappear? A good challenge to have.
We embarked on our next chapter: doubling down on creating an ecosystem where people with different motivations can come and participate — enhance that inner potential they have for engaging with nature, for finding peace and their place in this mighty universe, for the joy and the adventure of game play and to make money — all to eliminate the ‘but’, help connect with and feel good when surrounded by nature.
If creating QuestaGame was hard work, we had to think really really hard about how we could create an ecosystem that helped provide a joyful experience, enable collection of scientifically useful biodiversity data and be profitable for participants. This is how we have arrived on our journey to release a Play-Earn-Protect game in the metaverse: Guardians of Earth.
Sure, everybody and their bot is creating something in the ‘metaverse’ and talking about playing, earning and collaboration… so why is Guardians of Earth something special? Well I’ll explore this in an upcoming post, but first, in my next post, we need to unpack how tough it is creating a real world location-based game is tough and why creating one where the treasures are unknown is tougher…
-Mallika
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We are Guardians of Earth — building the first ever Play-Earn-Protect game where your real world knowledge and in-game actions help protect life on Earth.
- Visit our website to learn more — https://www.guardiansofearth.io/
- Follow us on Twitter and join the conversations — @GuardiansofE
- Join us on our GoE Discord server for exclusive updates — https://discord.gg/3NEDbsgdSK
