Games More Than Games

Story starts with a cycle. Dreams connect to data points, to the world around us and then—they become something we share. You to me and back to you. Around, around the words go, into our lives until as Thomas King says; “The truth about stories is; they’re all we are.”

In the world today we have many ways of describing life. Many ways of filtering through the rich experiences we have; some overwhelming, into something more manageable. Stories have been varied across cultures and religions. They follow different patterns and different rules. We like to categorize them into things like “comedy” and “tragedy” to help us feel more prepared for where they might go. Consent is important, in life and in film. A horror film hidden as a children’s cartoon will not last long.

Games are the key to solving climate change. Why? Because everything that is worst for the planet; is effectively a game.

I was working as a financial auditor and one of the top firms in the world. My teammates and I were in a competition to use data analytics tools and some low-grade artificial intelligence to improve the audit process. Accountants and auditors constantly face regulatory change; and we won an internal competition for our tool that could automate part of that process. After digging deep into data, and linking it with software, we built robots to find wells that needed to be recorded differently. Not only did it mean saving time; but it also meant finding them well, faster.

About the same time I was reading about neuroscience and the environments our brains our optimized for. It won’t be a surprise to anyone that the corporate world doesn’t measure up well. It may be better than it was before, but something about the way we work isn’t well matched to the way work is. I tried to hold these two opposing forces; what the brain needs, and what the boss needs in opposition.

As a storyteller I often visualize data points coming together into rivers. Different dots and lines of thought, flowing together into something living, something that draws people in and carries them along; engaging their whole being. I realized that the entire profession of audit is a form of storytelling. What are financial statements except the stories about the numbers of a company. Experts understand those numbers intimately, and can see a thousand stories when they look at just a few numbers. Numbers linked with special words. Numbers ?like arrows, flying so far in a certain direction, and words like their targets.

Organizations account for more than 70% of emissions in the world, and audit helps us trust that they are accurately represented. Most of that wealth is held by organizations; organisms we humans create that have distinct boundaries from each other. We need to know that their structure is right.

I took the lessons I learned about the future of automated auditing, and tried to apply them to reducing building emissions. In my hometown of Calgary, over 60% of our emissions come from buildings. So my team and I took the boring “checklists” of audit, and turned them into a home-audit game. Working with energy efficiency professionals for the details and indigenous artists for the game characters.

Then during Covid-19 I noticed something new. Some of my immediate community took a hard line in opposing restrictions and vaccines. They didn’t feel safe with that level of control. Maybe it was their intergenerational trauma from past government injustices, maybe it was ego. Whatever it was, I noticed that those who played more games had less of it.

Maybe games do more to us than just entertain us. Perhaps they change us in ways we don’t yet fully understand. Games are about numbers and stories, audit is about numbers and stories. Audit creates the trust that exists in capitalism; but it hasn’t yet been able to empower the markets to solve more complex problems like climate change.

I think games are the key; because games have a fundamentally different dynamic of trust and the human brain. While an auditor sounds scary; a game designer is the kind of person you’d want to chat with over coffee.

A game, by definition is something that doesn’t risk your life or death. While most species stop playing after they reach adulthood, humans are special, we can play until the day we die. Maybe that’s why we can do so much more than other animals, our games keep the child inside alive.

**** The content and frivolity expressed in this article is my personal perspective, it does not reflect the position of the incredible organizations I work with.