The problem with trying to get a high score to save the planet
The things that matter aren't always the things you can count, and trying to run up the score means you're missing out on the slow things that matter.
In the past few pandemic years, I've started playing video games again. We are surrounded by ambiguity, and a good game is a welcome reprieve where progress is countable, feedback is delivered instantly, and you can take as many attempts as you need to solve problems with little consequence.
Until I started playing them again, I underestimated how influential video games have become, and now I see their impact everywhere. Possibly two thirds of Americans are regularly playing some kind of digital game, idly on a mobile game on their phone, or fully immersed in a VR headset - but beyond the sheer numbers of people playing, video games have become a lens through which to view our lives, a kind of mobile metaphor that frames up all kinds of experiences.
For instance: the feedback loops in a lot of social media are essentially the same as in video games. I know I'm not alone in experiencing engagement with my social media posts as a kind of gauge for how funny/insightful/attractive I am; likes are a scoring mechanism, and many people use their social accounts to try to beat their high score. The game-iness of social media is particularly clear on TikTok where the For You Page algorithm introduces an element of controlled randomness akin to the slightly randomized generation of challenges or enemies in a video game.
It shows up everywhere. I judge many of my workouts based on the numbers my smartwatch gives me, a kind of instant scoring mechanism. The design choices can blur into each other: for instance, The Legend of Zelda's Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild both use a round stamina meter that looks very similar to the Apple Watch's workout circles.
It’s more fun to play together.
To the degree that social media is a game, it's also a team sport. The opportunity to reach people who share your interests is also an opportunity to play for high scores together, against other people. A lot of fandoms organize together to promote the brands they support by making them more visible online. The topics they trend, reach of the stories you distribute, and likes you can deliver for your favorite artist, team, or celebrity are all measures of collective success. Where rivalries develop - between pop star stan groups, Messi and Ronaldo fans, etc. - these competitions can take on a manic, obsessive dimension.
This is not all bad, of course, as long as it's kept in perspective. Evaluating your workouts can help you get stronger, getting feedback from friends and connections can tell you when you're saying something that resonates. But you shouldn't let social media feedback loops rule your engagement with politics or friends, just like you shouldn't spend all night every night playing video games.
The video game framework has also entered politics and advocacy. Playing politics like a game started simple: a lot of small dollar fundraising appeals by politicians have the feel of trying to run up the score to back your team, particularly when facing a deadline. (For people who work in political fundraising it's even more explicit: the dashboard for ubiquitous progressive fundraising platform ActBlue gives admins a running score and an option to hear a ding for every new donation.)
Trees, seas, and keeping score
But all of this leads to my real pet peeve: tree planting, trash cleanups, and the gamification of climate concern.
I love trees. But planting trees in bulk is an extremely modest tool to address climate change, and when you treat the number of trees you plant as the main measure of your actions, I think it's possible you're doing as much harm as good. A handful of celebrities, brands, and influencers have focused on treeplanting in a way that reflects this gamification of life, and I think it's important to understand how it's a problem.
First: planting tens of millions of trees will do not a whole lot to solve climate change. The problem with deforestation is not that we don't have enough trees, but instead that they keep being cut down, or catching on fire, and unless you stop either of those things from happening, chances are the carbon you capture by planting a tree will return to the atmosphere over the short to medium term.
There are solutions to those two problems, but in our wildly unequal planet they tend to look like creepy and semi-authoritarian land grabs to wall-off what was once farm land, shared cultural space, or just plain old public space for the sole purpose of capturing carbon emitted by wealthy people in the global north. It's bad.
Ditto ocean plastic cleanups. Taking plastic out of the ocean does not dispose of it. Moving it to a landfill just creates another route for microplastics and toxic byproducts to reach the air, water, and soil.
But the problems of climate change and ocean preservation are urgent and worrying, and solving them has become gamified, turning complex problems into opportunities to make a high score of trees planted or pounds of ocean plastic retrieved. The best examples of how responding to these problems gets turned into a high score are the Team Trees and Team Seas projects led by YouTubers Mark Rober and Mr. Beast.
Team Trees was launched first, with the goal of raising 20 million dollars to plant 20 million trees. This collective crowdfunding campaign roped in a lot of influential video creators, and reached many millions of people online.
Throughout Mr. Beast's launch video every tree planted generates a familiar game-show style 'ding' and ticks up a counter on-screen. These mechanics extend through the campaign's website, which has a running tally and a leaderboard not that different than one you'd see at the end of a multiplayer match of any number of popular games.
Missing the forest
20 million trees is a big flashy number that feels important, but that kind of progress could be wiped out so quickly: the 2011 Texas heatwave and drought, prior to this year the hottest in state history, killed 301 million trees in rural Texas alone over just a few months.
But I think the forest is literally being missed, for all the trees. Mark Rober's launch video for Team Trees literally starts with him standing in the middle of a clear cut, but never mentions where it came from. Scroll through the Team Trees project list, and you can easily pick out places that are being burned over and over by wildfires during the hottest years on earth. Watching these videos without a background in the issue might leave you understanding less about how to solve climate change than when you started. The causes of the problem are missing, but flashy, countable, high-score solutions are front and center.
Team Seas, and ocean cleanup project with a similar strategy of combining an ambitious fundraising goal with broad participation by creators. The money they raised went to beach cleanup projects, and the Ocean Cleanup, an extremely flawed project for removing sea-bound plastic.
The equivalent of the clear cut for Team Seas is the Rober's visit to a slum in the Dominican Republic. The bulk of the trash flowing into the river they're cleaning up is single use plastic - bottled water, and food containers. The Team Seas solution is to provide better trash disposal, which overlooks the more glaring problem: sanitation.
The best way to reduce single use plastic waste is reusable products. But you can't clean re-usable materials if you don't have clean running water, which the neighborhoods he was visiting clearly did not. It's important to ask why the Dominican Republic doesn't have universal access to clean water, and therefore single-use plastic replacements, rather than trying to get more trash bins - because by the time you're picking up the trash, most of the damage to the planet has already been done.
But changing the political environment to reduce climate disasters or shift wealth to rebuild infrastructure is hard, and progress is slow, and thus hard to add up into a high score by the end of a video. The illusion of progress that comes when you deliver big numbers in a short timeframe using game mechanisms can spin watchers out in very strange directions.
Witness for instance the number of tweets like these using #TeamTrees as a cudgel against Greta Thunberg, someone who has done as much as any person can hope to do to address climate change. But it will be years before we can fully understand her impact, because her measures of success are in the domains of awareness and policy. But the idea of running up a count for your team captain, Mr. Beast, is so ingrained that some people can't help targeting other influential figures who can't boast the same kind of short term counting metrics.
These reactions aren't necessarily representative of the whole response to #TeamTrees. There's some evidence that making small lifestyle changes, or donations to a cause can form an emotional bond with an issue that leads to a lifetime of engagement. I hope that's true, in this case, because I hope that millions of young people continue to stay involved in an issue that defines our lives.
I think the dopamine tickling clarity of a video game is really wonderful for some purposes. It can even tell some kinds of stories extremely well. But the framework of generating a high score for your environmentalism shapes your focus into a very narrow set of tools. It can make small gestures look larger than they are, and more significant, slower efforts harder to understand. We definitely need more trees in more places, but to get them we'll need more efforts that won't be so easily scored.
Terrific piece! 15/10 recommend ;)
Oh man Duncan did you nail it! It's heartbreaking to see so many well-intended but not fully informed people being lead down these paths. Then when they hear criticism of the path, they become even more disillusioned and a pummeled sense of agency and efficacy. I love that there is so much interest and desire in addressing challenging issues, but people always gravitate to the simplest and easiest path, which is often ineffective. This approach is exploding. I am at wits end about what I can do to counter it.