If You Want to Save the World, Call on Middle School Girls

Council of GAIA is a cooperative–competitive tabletop game in which players assume the role of national leaders. Each player is responsible for meeting the core needs of their population—food, water, energy, employment, and economic growth—while simultaneously reducing global carbon emissions in coordination with other countries.

The game is played over nine rounds, representing roughly seventy years of real-world time. Each round introduces a series of tradeoffs: invest in rapid growth or long-term resilience, compete for limited resources or negotiate shared solutions, protect national advantage or safeguard planetary stability. Carbon-based infrastructure adds cumulative emissions to the atmosphere, and with each round, an irreversible marker advances toward a planetary tipping point. Once crossed, no player wins.

What makes the game difficult is not a lack of information. All players understand the rules. All can see the trajectory. And yet, most groups fail.

In session after session—across public schools, universities, businesses, hardcore gaming communities, and even military contexts—the outcome was remarkably consistent. Players optimized for their own country’s success. Short-term gains accumulated. Cooperation was discussed but delayed. Tradeoffs were framed as risks rather than opportunities. The planet was typically destroyed well before the ninth round.

Participants often expressed surprise at the result. Individually, their decisions felt reasonable—even responsible. Collectively, those same decisions produced collapse.

Then a pattern emerged that no one anticipated.

One demographic consistently succeeded where all others failed: middle school girls, roughly twelve years old.

These players approached the game differently from the start. They questioned the assumption that there had to be a single winner. They treated the table as a shared problem space rather than a competitive arena. Instead of protecting individual advantages, they openly explored all possible pathways—including those that required mutual restraint, shared investment, and long-term coordination.

Most notably, they reframed success.

Rather than optimizing for personal or national victory conditions, they adopted a group winning condition: sustaining life on Earth while keeping all countries viable. Shields came down. Information flowed freely. Decisions were debated not in terms of “What benefits me now?” but “What keeps the system intact over time?”

The result was striking. While most adult groups destroyed the planet within five or six rounds, these teams regularly completed all nine rounds with the Earth intact—and with multiple countries thriving.

The difference was not intelligence, knowledge, or commitment. It was perspective.

The girls demonstrated an ability that many experienced professionals struggled to access: the capacity to hold multiple possibilities at once, to think systemically, and to prioritize collective outcomes over short-term individual gain. They did not see cooperation as weakness. They saw it as strategy.

Council of GAIA revealed something profound about learning and leadership. The greatest barrier to solving complex, interconnected challenges is not information or expertise. It is the mental models we bring into the room—what we assume is possible, permissible, or realistic.

Experiential simulations make those assumptions visible. They allow people to test alternatives, experience long-term consequences in compressed time, and explore what becomes possible when competition gives way to coordination.

If a group of twelve-year-old girls can solve a problem that experts routinely cannot—when given the right experience—then the path forward is not about lowering ambition. It is about redesigning how we learn to see, decide, and act together.

And that may be the most hopeful signal of all.