The Species View: Seeing Beyond Short-Term Wins to Human Survival and Flourishing
The game that started it all for my company, GamaVida, was Council of GAIA, a game focused on making better decisions about climate change on behalf of the human race. I’m not entirely sure why I chose to begin with such a complex theme, but coming on the heels of publishing Smart Green, I felt compelled to explore new ways of bringing the realities of climate change into focus—not just intellectually, but experientially.
I still remember inviting a close friend—also deeply committed to sustainable development in North Carolina—to coffee so I could share a vision. Not just for a game, but for a company that could integrate experiential learning and climate change into a viable consulting and learning practice.
A week earlier, I had stayed up all night surrounded by sheets of poster paper, sketching a game designed to answer a single question: Why has it been so difficult for nations to unite around a collective threat—rising temperatures, sea-level rise, species decline—driven largely by fossil fuel dependence, when so many viable and profitable alternatives already exist?
At the center of the board sat the Earth. Around it, a nine-step track spiraled inward, ending in a skull. Dramatic, perhaps—but intentionally so. It was meant to make visible our collective march toward extinction if we continued to ignore the science and double down on compounding carbon emissions.
Each year, representatives from around the world gather at COP meetings to negotiate agreements intended to slow or reverse this trajectory. When I was designing the game in late 2011, reports from the IPCC, the UN, and other institutions were already warning that continued inaction would accelerate temperature rise exponentially. Rather than simulate every variable, I chose to focus on two deeply human patterns: myopic thinking and parochial thinking.
Myopic thinking prioritizes short-term gains—quarterly returns, election cycles, immediate wins—while parochial thinking narrows responsibility to what feels local, visible, or personally consequential. Together, they fracture cause and effect across time and distance. A policy that boosts GDP today can quietly destabilize food systems decades later. Melting ice at the poles or shifting ocean currents remain abstract until consequences arrive at our doorstep.
The problem is not that these signals are absent. It’s that they unfold too slowly, too diffusely, to register within the time horizons most decisions are made. Climate change behaves less like a sudden collapse and more like compounding interest—doubling, and doubling again, until a threshold is crossed. Until we can feel that curve, not just understand it, we will continue to respond too slowly and too late.
I believed a game could help bridge that perceptual gap.
In Council of GAIA, players assume the role of national leaders, each responsible for meeting basic needs—food, water, energy, employment, economic growth—while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions alongside three or four other leaders facing the same pressures. A two-hour session compresses seventy years of decision-making into a lived experience. Trade-offs, feedback loops, and unintended consequences become unavoidable.
Every action feels rational in isolation: build a power plant, expand industry, secure jobs. Yet every carbon-based decision adds emissions to the atmosphere. Over time, those emissions accumulate and advance a marker on the Earth board toward extinction. One of the game’s most powerful lessons emerges here: no single decision appears catastrophic—until their cumulative effect is undeniable.
Most climate information arrives through books, reports, and slide decks. But when you play the decisions—when you negotiate, compete, and collaborate while still chasing a “high score”—their implications become visible within a compressed timeframe. This is what I call "The Species View": seeing beyond short, periodic metrics to the conditions required for long-term survival and flourishing across generations.
Since its completion, The Council of Gaia has been played in public schools, universities, businesses, and even the Pentagon. It was play-tested by hard-core gamers at Gen Con, where it received enthusiastic reviews. Players consistently found it both challenging and fun. As one gamer remarked, “Finally, a game that isn’t about orcs and zombies, just something more frightening.”
What proved most revealing, however, was the outcome. In early sessions, most groups destroy the planet before reaching the ninth round. Players struggle with the realization that decisions enabling one nation to thrive can simultaneously generate distributed harms that eventually negate everyone’s success. Suspending real-world assumptions long enough to explore alternative, cooperative pathways is surprisingly difficult—especially when it requires redefining what it means to “win.”
Only one demographic consistently grasped this more quickly than others: middle-school girls. They were the first to abandon defensive strategies and individual victory conditions. They treated the game as a shared optimization problem. They coordinated energy transitions earlier, accepted short-term sacrifices, and reframed success as sustaining life on Earth rather than outperforming one another.
By contrast, many business leaders and military participants destroyed the planet within six rounds—often while feeling they were playing “rationally.”
This contrast revealed something essential. By biological collectivism, I don’t mean political ideology or the erosion of individual agency. I mean recognizing that survival itself is a collective property of living systems. No species persists by optimizing solely for individual advantage.
There is reason for hope—but only if we dramatically increase the variety and frequency of experiences that help people move beyond parochial and myopic thinking, adopt a species-level perspective in the game world, and carry those insights back into the real one.
Three Action Steps to Apply The Species View
Stress-test decisions across longer time horizons In strategy sessions, explicitly ask: What does this decision optimize for in 1 year, 10 years, and 50 years? Make long-term consequences visible, even when they feel abstract.
Redefine “winning” in complex systems Shift success metrics from individual or departmental performance to shared outcomes—resilience, sustainability, and collective viability.
Use experiential simulations, not just analysis Whether through games, scenarios, or role-based simulations, create opportunities for teams to experience compounding effects and systemic feedback, not just discuss them.
Finally, if we want different outcomes, we need different experiences—ones that help us see ourselves not just as competitors or consumers, but as participants in a living system whose survival depends on our ability to think and act together.
#SystemsThinking #ExperientialLearning #CollectiveIntelligence