So we feel like we better collect and save for ourselves and for our families.īut this idea of scarcity is crazy. It's the idea that there's not enough for everybody. There's a mindset that leads us to create scarcity in our behavior with our neighbors, with our partners, with other countries. What gets in the way of solving big problems today, do you think? Even if you lost, you couldn't believe these groups actually brought real elephants to your town.Īs a boy, I witnessed the creative potential we have to solve anything. So people created these crazy strategies out of nothing. The first team said, "No! You can't do that!" But the second team said, "Nobody said you couldn't paint a real elephant pink." We're the amazing ones!"īut another team brought an elephant from another town and they started painting it pink. This team thought they were going to win since they had the elephant. So he probably said, "OK, take it, but bring it back in three hours! Please! Because I have a show." And the owner loaned them the elephant because everyone knows that the gincana is something sacred. This is an ancestral training system that awakens and strengthens the power of community because you cannot complete the mission by yourself.Īfter five minutes, someone in the crowd said, "The circus!" Then his team ran and drove to the circus in another city. And there's certainly no pink elephant anywhere! But when the guy said we had three hours, the whole town started screaming and running, trying to find a solution. And the guy said into the microphone, "You have three hours to bring a real pink elephant." There was this stage in front of the church where the whole town of thousands of people gathered to hear what the mission was. I remember the first one that I played in my hometown of Santos. What's an example of one of these missions that community members would compete in? I witnessed the creative potential we have to solve anything." Marlena Waldthausen for NPR Edgard Gouveia discovered the power of games as a boy when his community would embark on an annual competitive activity - like finding a pink elephant! He says that games represent "a kind of collective intelligence. There was actually a commission that created these missions. It was like a big weekend festival.Īnd we played silly, impossible missions. We created teams of 500 or 600 people that included kids and adults and grandparents. Once a year, the whole town or city was invited to play together. Fewer communities play it today, but you can still find maybe 30 cities in Brazil where it's played. When I was a kid, we had this game called gincana. When was the first time you realized that games could be used to achieve something big?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. NPR sat down with Gouveia to discuss his ambitions to crowdsource and gamify the solving of big problems and how games grabbed a hold of him as a boy. "And they're able to mobilize the adults among them." Gouveia's thinking is that if you can frame a problem as a challenge or epic journey, then kids "can solve a lot of problems that adults can't," he says. "For example, games that can make a whole town, a whole city or even a whole country play together," he says.Īnd now he's developing a global game called " Jornada X" whose goal is to get kids and teenagers to save nothing less than all life on the planet. And his target audiences keep getting bigger.
He's worked with schools, companies, government offices and slums. "I use games and narrative to mobilize crowds," says the Brazilian game inventor and co-founder of Livelab. Edgard Gouveia Jr., 58, says the key to solving the world's problems is games.
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