Most people wouldn't associate growing food with a game. It's hard work (as the summers in my youth working on our family farm attest to). Despite this preconception, gaming software (and particularly MMOs -- massively multiplayer online games), might be a way to supercharge local food production. Connect these data points:
Analysis: Farming as a MMO game
There's a new game (both my kids and some readers pointed this out to me), called Farmville, that's gaining considerable popularity. It works as a Facebook add-on, and is easily downloaded via Flash. It turns virtual farming (from planting to reaping to going to market) into a fun social experience. The game now sports 60 million active users.
Analysis: Permaculture
Permaculture, the use of designed ecosystems to produce food, might be one of the best ways to add food production (and a large variety of other outputs) to a resilient community. Here's why. Traditional farming is input intensive. From manual work (both machine and human) to energy (pesticides to fertilizer), inputs drive output. In contrast, permaculture uses natural ecosystem function to replace many of these tangible inputs to provide outputs on par with traditional farming. The problem is designing the ecosystem of a permaculture plot to achieve high rates of return (output/input). In short, brain work has the opportunity to replaced brawn but it's tough to do.
Synthesis: The MMO + Permaculture Bootstrap
So, as with most activities/industries that have replaced brawn and physical inputs with brain work and ideas, it probably needs some software to get it going (where Moore's law and network dynamics can help accelerate its productivity over time).
Unfortunately, the current state of software that aids the design of permaculture plots is pretty dismal. The best people can do is cobble together mapping software, 3D landscape modeling software, and some auto CAD. Of course, it is possible if the resources were available (my team of developers could do it), to build software that enables people to design, optimize, and share permaculture plots, that misses a great opportunity.
The real opportunity is to build a learning system via software, one that naturally trains the people that use it, gets better and more sophisticated over time, and is fun. The only way I know how to do that is build a game.
One of the first things to do, is build a simple Farmville type social game that helps people learn permaculture design principles:
- Conservation. Efficiency of inputs.
- Repeating functions. Redundancy.
- Stacking functions. Multiple uses for the same thing.
- Reciprocity. Outputs of one part of the system are inputs for another. In other words, cascading processes maximize the energy yield of the system.
- Local scale. Minimal organizational overhead. Match production to local need.
- Diversity. Lots of different ecosystem participants increases resilience.
As the game grows, it could move to a much higher level. For example, gaming software that offers the ability to add connections to the real world (satellite imagery/topography of actual plots), has high end graphics (for more immersive and detailed plot design), and provides models/simulation (to test new configurations). In fact, if done through a game, the upfront training requirements for using this new functionality would be nearly zero (for new and existing users). I could go on and get much more detailed on this, but I suspect you get the picture.