Jasper Tomas, Jeroen Mets, Dan Fisker, may I pitch an idea?
I am founder of a permaculture community (25 years ago.) on the Big Island of Hawai`i, and our nonprofit's (dragonseyecenter.org) most recent project is to develop a youth-operated and -owned agricultural cooperative outside of the nearby town of Pahoa, which would function as a "school-like" entity with systems most similar to The Sudbury Valley School (sudval.org). This would be a 30 acre, 150-member, multimillion dollar development, for which the time seems ripe based on numerous conversations we've had with significant local politicians, educators, and visionaries, including our State Senator. Since my daughter, and many of the youth who are involved, are such avid Minecraft users, we have been toying with an idea of starting with either Google Earth data of an actual property (we have several in our scopes) or with an idealized local parcel, to within Minecraft build a to-scale replica of what the project would look like ten years down the road, when all the buildings are built, when the alley cropping and food systems and trees and waterworks/aquaponics and water slide and methane biodigester and wind/photovoltaic systems are all implemented and mature (the budget and architectural plans and basic permaculture design for this project is already fairly well sketched out) Within this replica, we would develop a series of adventure mode campaigns. The point of each adventure would be to solve/overcome significant challenges and obstacles to realizing build-out of the cooperative. Obvious obstacles include: financing/fundraising, ethics of ownership (discovering and innovating ways in which minors can "own" or be stakeholders in the project), and regulatory hurdles (composting toilets, methane biodigesters, greywater, alternative building techniques). As players explore the landscape, they would discover information that would assist them in developing a real-life strategy for surmounting the obstacle. Each win would mean that a new section of the cooperative would be added to the map. Completion of all the levels would mean that a comprehensive alpha plan for implementation had been produced, and enough money earned to fully fund a reasonably attainable next step in the process.
The idea would be to ask popular youtube Minecraft gamers to donate towards this cause by playing the adventures and appealing to their subscribers to make small donations to the project. In the process, we would have created a template for other organizations or regions to envision and begin their own youth agriculture cooperative initiatives. If the project is sufficiently professional and intriguing, it might be possible to approach Microsoft/Mojang for tax-deductible donations to the project.
I am not a gamer and am slowly becoming familiarized with Minecraft's possibilities. I am very interested in the mods that would allow a team to incorporate bricks that represent permaculture design elements.
I also like the idea of having gameplay include cycling of permaculture elements; for instance, could the cycle of coppicing => fertility => food crop or animal feed => harvesting/preparation => humanure recycling be mimicked in a fun or educational manner, so that interested youth might explore permaculture concepts within the world? (I think this aspect would be too boring for the youtube gamer adventure challenge).
Any feedback from any of you would be most welcome. I am currently donating time towards exploring the viability of this idea; if it looks feasible, next I will look for small local grants to hire a project co-ordinator who could work with and direct a team of (hopefully) local teens to build the world. I would be a consultant as far as story-line and obstacles. There might be hyperlinks incorporated into the adventure (like the currently dead Hawaii Sustainable Research Zoning Designation bill, or youtube footage of live lava). There is definitely an interesting thread relating to lava, with our location being on an active volcano with the powerful presence of a traditional creation/destruction archetype, Pele. The town we're building near was nearly wiped by active flows 3 years ago, and there is a raging local controversy about geothermal energy and fracking.
I've looked at scale, and I'm pretty sure we'd want to scale up, so that 1 brick equaled a foot. This way, we could create more discriminating and identifiable versions of the different plants in the systems, and architectural renderings of the structures would be more accurate (what building has meter-thick walls?) This might pose a problem when it comes to already existing mods like cows.
Thank you very much for reading. You can contact me directly at
23.diga@gmail.com
