Celebrating Earth Day with the United Planet Game

Happy bEARTHday to United Planet! 2 years ago today we created the United Planet Festival online to celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day. We had around 40,000 people view the steam with over 100 speakers, musicians and performances from leaders of regenerative culture.

Since then I’ve architected the United Planet Game to be a time-travelling immersive reality where players create positive narratives, culture and mythologies from the future. I started this grand experiment with a few ‘meta questions’:

1. How can we enable the design of the future to be a team sport for planetary talent — connecting ‘athletes of systems change’ to envision and create a thriving future?
2. How can we create a new funding marketplace of exponential solutions based on reverse engineering from the future rather than incremental improvements from the present? What will be the role of Web3 tools such as the Metaverse, DeFi, DAOs and blockchain to enable this movement?
3. How can we build trusted communities and unleash collective intelligence around the systemic challenges of our time?

The 52nd Earth Day is a good moment for an update. I’ve created many prototypes in Ibiza and around the world from which I’ve formulated a methodology and plan that is now ready to execute on. I’m being invited to create UP Games in locations around the world including during Katapult FutureFest in Oslo, Davos in Switzerland, Commonwealth Summit in Rwanda, UNGA in New York, COP27 in Egypt and others. This will be a powerful way to bring thousands of leaders into a way of thinking about the future that expands their horizons, hopes and visions of what is possible when we have a unifying narrative that binds us together.

This summer we are planning to host four United Planet Games in Ibiza in order to apply a systematic approach to developing a narrative for a thriving planetary civilization in harmony with all life. Between June and September, 192 leaders, storytellers and visionaries will be invited to join one of 16 teams to create an immersive vision of a thriving future. Each team of 12 players will have a full day from which to showcase their futures.

My intention is for the teams to be as diverse as possible and have some unique roles. Currently, we are exploring sponsorship for each team to have a historian in partnership with the History Co-Lab. I believe the time-travelling experience can be even more potent by travelling back in time to key historic points to create a narrative of where we came from and where we went wrong. Take Sustainable Food for example — the historian will take us on an immersive journey through thousands of years of the evolution of agriculture and into the emergence of the industrial agriculture age and its effect on biospheres, soil and society. From here we can step into the future together having developed an immersive narrative of the past.

Similarly, we intend to experiment with an experience designer on every team responsible for creating rituals and immersions that express the collective vision of the team. Likewise, we intend to have at least one musician on every team to be able to transform stories into lyrical journeys. We are also exploring having an actor/actress on each team that can support the other members of the team in an immersive role-play where everyone creates a ‘collective spell’ by speaking the future in the present tense.

Each UP Game focuses on mythologizing the elements:

• Air Leagues (June 6th, July 4th, August 15th, September 12th) represents the needs of all Gaian life and how we reach our fullest potential with the Air Team creating stories around Health & Well-being, Water Security, Unleashing Potential and Sustainable Food.
• The Water Leagues (June 7th, July 5th, August 16th, September 13th) represents the return to community with the Water Team creating stories around Community Abundance, Wealthy Commons, Regenerative Cities and Infrastructure Transformation.
• The Fire Leagues (June 8th, July 6th, August 17th, September 14th) represents cultural and societal transformations with Fire Team creating stories around Gender Harmony, Peace & Justice, Thriving for all and Circular Economies.
• The Earth Leagues (June 9th, July 7th, August 18th, September 15th) represents the planetary narrative and identity with the Earth Team creating stories around Planetary Health, Ocean Stewardship, Ubiquitous Energy and Land Stewardship.

Each week is designed around Air Day on Monday, Water day on Tuesday, Fire Day on Wednesday, Earth day on Thursday and Aether day on Friday. The Aether day is focused on all four teams creating a collective mythology of the highlights from the previous four days of team led immersions.

The teams are as follows:

Players will spend a week living together in a luxury 300-year-old former monastery. We will be activating many of the most unique locations in Ibiza to create the container for what many players have previously described as one of the best weeks of their lives. Our goal is to create the conditions for individual and collective transformation.

We have a TV show planning to follow the June UP Game and we will be recording for an ongoing United Planet documentary. We have created our first film called Time Ritual from the UP Game we hosted in Damanhur, Italy in October last year. This film is in its final edits and should be ready to be shared soon.

We are recording content in order to seed a mythological metaverse for United Planet. I am currently exploring the creation of VR content for the United Planet Metaverse from the UP Games. I see the Games as a phenomenal way to both demonstrate the positive power of the metaverse and bridge location-based live immersive experiences with a global audience. In addition, we’re looking at new technologies such as 4K Body cameras on every player in order to create a choose your own adventure into the future for Gaians in the Metaverse.

The objective of the UP Game is to co-create:

1. Deep Community — ‘Communitas’ is the feeling of oneness. We seek to come together as Gaians around our new story.
2. Collective Healing — ‘Catharsis’ is necessary for us to become whole. We will explore the healing of collective trauma and how we transformed this into the birth of a Planetary Civilization.
3. Ecstatic Consciousness — We feel ‘Ecstasis’ when we meet with open hearts, love and childlike faith that we are here to transform the destructive path of the dystopian story.
4. Radical Hope — The future should not be predicted but achieved. We are here to architect and reverse engineer positive futures in a non-incremental way.
5. Unifying Narrative — Our artefact is a response to the crisis of meaning by crafting a new story of a thriving civilization in harmony with all life.

The goal is for each team to launch a DAO with a treasury so that members can continue to reverse engineer their visions into reality. We will be creating NFTs around the content developed by each team to create more funding for teams to grow and execute. We are planning to sell and gift up to 192 Genesis NFTs to fund the formation of the DAO and Games.

I believe creating a unifying vision of a thriving future is our best pathway to creating a cultural movement that will engage the millions of us necessary to turn our planetary future from dystopia towards protopia. I am looking for the following to execute this audacious vision:

• Early investors into the United Planet NFTs and philanthropic funders via Civana Foundation
• Planetary talent with a passion for storytelling the future in the present tense.
• Coalition, community and organization partners to accelerate their collective impact through the United Planet storytelling platform.
• Web3 experts wanting to join the founding team of contributors to the forthcoming United Planet DAO.