What if we could more easily connect with our ancestors and listen to the land to learn other ways of living on this Earth?

​How might we come together across diverse geographies to design community projects using this ancestral and land-based wisdom?

This is what we are experimenting with at Building Beyond and this is the first in a series of “Build in Public” posts where I will periodically share with you our journey building this initiative in addition to my regular writing on transitioning to new systems in the age of polycrisis.

The vision we have for Building Beyond is ambitious...an ecosystem that encompasses:

• personal ancestral journeys and the sharing of ancestral wisdom and technologies

• oral histories and stories contributed by elders and by youth working with elders

• community land projects that present real-world challenges, with solutions designed in the game ideally implemented on those same lands

  
  

These journeys and community challenges co-create a reciprocal ecosystem where everyone benefits and the game grows as more knowledge and experiences are shared. The ecosystem is a space to imagine and remember alternatives to our current systems and connect with others to build them.

Our First Pilot & Pivot

While it’s a long-term vision, we had to start building somewhere and that somewhere was South Texas, on a community land project called Tierrita Grande.

For most of 2024, we built a video game pilot and a knowledge base inspired by the land itself. However, as we built this interactive game we slowly realized that most of the interest in Building Beyond was coming from individuals wanting to connect to their ancestral roots or lands, not from land stewards wanting to gamify their projects.

Erika Casasola, team member and land steward of Tierrita Grande

Although we want the game to support community land projects, we were starting from the end goal rather than what would drive people to engage in the first place. So we shifted focus to what was bringing people to our initiative: the desire to connect with their roots and to find their role in the building of new systems.

Future posts will explain what we are currently building, but I wanted to start our Build in Public series with a recap of what we did last year and what we learned trying to connect the virtual to the physical.

Tierrita Grande Game

The game we designed includes 8 quests and a game slice that allows players to "walk the land" virtually, experiencing its history and challenges.

Here was our process:

1. Listen to the Land

We made multiple visits to walk the land and listen. We mapped out the trail network along which the quests of the game were designed based on what we learned from the land.

Erika Casasola teaching how to make an antibacterial soap from a plant at Tierrita Grande

2. Design the Game

We, along with a few high school interns, designed a game based on the land’s features, animals, plants, water issues, histories and stories from elders.

Elena Carrasco designing the game quests based on the trail network at Tierrita Grande

3. Build the Knowledge Base

We interviewed elders, both those who had been on the land before and those connected to the traditions of the lands to feed our AI-assisted NPC (non-player character) called the Land Protector which allows the player to get guidance in the game. We also incorporated some animal friends as NPCs, our favorite being the Giant TX Walking Stick.

Left Image: Lee Pera interviewing Abuela Maritza Alvarez Martinez. Right Image: Erika Casasola with Maestra Rita Naverrete.

What We Learned:

• Focus on data and community, wait to build. Game industry colleagues encouraged us to focus on building the data model and continue our community building rather than building the actual game. Since AI tools were rapidly disrupting their industry, they said we would benefit by waiting to build.

• Pivot to focus on individual journeys, and then tie those to community. A game based on one piece of land is great to involve local youth, but harder to engage with players in other geographies unless it’s personally relevant to them.

• Gamers are fastidious about details. If you say the game models the land exactly, it better as they will zoom into imagery and find any discrepancies. It’s safer to say it is “inspired by” the features of the land.

• Elders were interested in sharing their knowledge through a new medium and our interns found it fun to create the NPCs (Non-player characters) for the elders and for animals like the Stick Bug.

• We learned many interesting facts about the game industry (more in future posts), but a few impressive ones were:

  • 80% of gamers surveyed (in a survey of 300,000 players) said gaming can be used to address environmental issues

  • Almost 30% of gamers are over 50 years old (29% of players are now 50 or older compared to 17% in 2004 and just 9% in 1999)

  • Over 40% of the world’s population plays video games (that’s 3.3 people building in digital worlds!)

    
    

Sources for bullets above:

Statistics from Deborah Mensah-Bonsu’s project described in her TED Talk, “Why Video Games Aren’t a Waste of Time” Nov. 2023

Entertainment Software Association, 2024: https://www.theesa.com/resources/essential-facts-about-the-us-video-game-industry/2024-data/