Age of Empires II is a strategy video game where you have a civilization and use your citizens to gather resources and build buildings and you can fight against other players of other civilizations of the map.
I have been playing with my brother and it is cool but after a while it gets tiring having to gather resources fast to build military buildings to build troops to crush the opponent - or get crushed-.
So yesterday I decided to try a new approach, I played by myself with the computer who was two players, allies instead of enemies - so it was like I was playing with two humans allied - and I focused on developing my population, and instead of creating military buildings I created farms. My allies at times asked for resources and I helped them out, and I asked for resources from them at times, so we helped each other instead of fighting.
The game works on points too, if you have more points you are the winner. So by making a lot of farms I did not know that you could win by points too, and I won by points. By making farms I had the population busy doing something useful instead of fighting with the other civilizations.
After a while of playing like this the resources ran out because the game has limited resources/is not sustainable but if we extrapolate the game to real life, here on Earth we can all develop real farms and live there supporting the environment and ourselves, we would be all busy and not go into fights with other countries.
And this is what is doing Earth Haven, (www.earthhaven.org) with the goal of developing self-sustainable communities all around the globe.
"The guiding principle in these communities is to bring about the utmost potential of the land, which must sustain all forms of life on the land: the animals, plants and humans. Under this principle, we regard farm animals and wild animals to be equally important. In summary, we are doing what is best for all which means the land, the animals, plants, and humans. Without exception."
This is the cool part, where through sustaining ourselves we also help out the environment/other life forms of the land.
I visited Earth Haven for two weeks some years ago and I can say living there is pretty cool, with all the animals there, from dogs to horses to chickens, cats, parrots, goats and of course living in a supportive community of humans.
All in all it is a win win situation for the humans and plants and animals.
By doing this, by living in self-sustainable communities we change the rules of the game, where previously it was to fight with each other whereas now the goal is to help each other to develop our communities and support the environment. Where we know we could fight each other but we don't, as we are busy with bettering our communities and the environment and see no point in going to fight someone else.
You can support Earth Haven with me -I give a small monthly contribuiton - on Patreon.
http://www.patreon.com/earthhaven
I originally wrote this post here:
http://bipolarsjourneytolife.blogspot.com.es/2018/02/day-56-age-of-empires-and-self.html