Comments on: A Virtual Geoff Lawton Urges You to Cross the Line

By: Permaculture Activist

Permaculture Activist — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:08:49 +0000

Some other comments on this video from the PermaScience Channel;

osdias (19 hours ago)

I’ve wanted to leave my desk job for a permaculture course… this might have just tipped me to cross the line

AranyaGardens (1 week ago)

Well done! This is fab a really motivating piece, very nicely done. Look out World, here comes PERMACULTURE!

thesimulacre (1 week ago)

At first I thought: “talking about permaculture in a human-created virtual environment is nonsensical!” But then I listened. Now it appears to be a great choice for the words… a GREAT choice.

And thank you, Geoff. You are right on (at least I presume so by my calculations made from the safety of my [still] suburban surroundings).

The voices always grow louder as you approach a crossroads.

By: Fredd

Fredd — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:00:45 +0000

Pedro, I couldn’t agree more. I’d love to see a sandbox-style simulation of a small piece of land, where you can choose what to plant when and where, how to harvest etc, all modeled on real processes. So it is simulating permaculture principles, and to play it the best you have to learn how everything interacts. It would not only be a fun game, but a wonderful teaching and design tool for thinking about how to approach your own piece of land.

There is potential here for a really great video game. I just have no idea how to make it.

SimFarm remake anyone? only instead of tractors and cornfields, small plots and food forests.

It would be complex, perhaps having climate, water, plant and soil modeling, and the interactions and exchanges between different plants, but it’s not an impossible thing.

You have a sim-family, the goal is to turn a piece of land, either based on a real place via topographic information, or a randomly generated set of criteria, into a productive piece of land to give your sim-family food as well as profit.

The fun would come with being open ended, you can do what you like, but the challenge would be doing that in a way that actually works with the system in play to produce a desirable result.

Please, someone make this.

By: john

john — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:41:14 +0000

but the good life was designed to stop people breaking away from the system. It ridicules us and talks about self sufficiency. That word designed to keep people in the system.

By: Tim Auld

Tim Auld — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 04:46:36 +0000

Pedro – I work in video games, and I’ve had similar thoughts. It could be a worthwhile project. I’m in the process of designing a permaculture board game, useful for high school and permaculture classes as an educational tool. It can be played cooperatively on one board (everyone discusses how resources should be used), and competitively between multiple boards (the team with the most resources at the end wins).

By: trevor bamford

trevor bamford — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:59:44 +0000

love that virtual world avatar of you Geoff – might need a bit of work on the mannerisms and form in the rendering but all-in-all imho i think its very effective, especially the use of virtual scenarios to communicate perspective in amongst the interview dialogue – i have to agree with Pedro Rodriguez above too – way cool

By: Alexandra Rodriguez

Alexandra Rodriguez — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:46:36 +0000

I’m speechless. But I’m going to share this little video with everyone. Thank you.

By: Pedro Rodriguez

Pedro Rodriguez — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:16:03 +0000

It would be great if someone made a videogame about permaculture, i imagine as a simulation game like Simcity, where you could sart up with cetain topography and climate having a wide pallete of species to combine and so on…