How to play Edgeryders
It’s almost Edgeryders! Want to sneak in and find out what the game looks like? No can do, but a preview in terms of content might do the trick.
Like any game, Edgeryders combines key elements which make it interesting:
Players: people of all ages and fron diverse locations who reasonate with the need to build a coherent narrative about the coordinates of transition nowadays
Purpose: after six months of playing, Edgeryders will collaboratively edit the Policy Makers Transition Handbook
Competition: players gather points by completing missions, but they do it not only individually, also in teams; there are no adversaries; the focus per se is not to get ahead of other players, but to move forward in your own journey and contribute commulatively to achieving the purpose
Campaigns: these are milestones or sequences of missions which belong to the same topic or aspect of transition. Playing Edgeryders means you start from the first one and you have to complete each mission to be able to move to the next campaign. Don’t worry: there are briefs which introduce you to the topic and give you tips on how to gain points. Completing a mission not only brings points(=knowledge) to you, but also adds valuable content which all the players can benefit from. Whilst advancing in the game you get to exchange information with other players and put together resources, help each other out, find out a common strategy which could be of use to people both inside and outside Edgeryders. That type of information will be picked up when editing the Policy Makers Transition Handbook.
Concretely, there are 9 campaigns waiting to be fuelled with content. This is only a summary of them because we wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun of discovery.
- Bootcamp: in here players begin by sharing their stories, rating and commenting on others and finding trailblazers; these are people who inspire others due to something that they achieved or an approach they used to solve a problem; anybody can be nominated as a trailblazer
- Making a living: this is the starting of a new narrative; we first look at how official data and discourse portray young people in the job market and compare it with our own, first end information; then we move from employment to social innovation, that is, see how others have managed to start careers and build innovative working spaces
- Caring for commons: means learning strategies to preserve and enhance collective goods; these can be public spaces, both physical and virtual (e.g. digital commons)
- Art, media and culture: how can we use these tools to challenge the traditional view on the young? Can we make the elders relate to our experience as a generation?
- Living together: this campaign looks at how we can value living and mobility by sharing; it also looks at sharing space in diverse communities and overcoming conflict; the question is: how do we improve mutual understanding between people inhabiting different corners of society?
- Learning: this is a complex campaign! the aim is to fill in the dots between what we learn in formal education and what we can use in the job market; is there need for other skills and training? can less traditional education solve the problem? what knowledge is needed in making the transition?
- WE, the people: in here, Edgeryders search for democratic channels to make the voices of the young heard; some of them may even learn to become activists. A shared goal is to learn strategies to participate and use government response to build the future
- Resilience: this one is a campaign for what you call advanced players. The question we try to answer is : are you ready for the worst case scenario? How do we build a sustainable world?
- Final campaign: collaborative editing of the Policy Makers Transition Handbook.
If you’re curious to find out how all these elements unfold on the platform, sign up as beta tester and you’ll be the first to play the game!
If you are a public institution, a nonprofit organization or a social business, and you want to be part of the fair, sustainable future Europe’s young are building, Edgeryders needs you. The Council of Europe welcomes participation from public institutions, third sector and business organisations, citizen groups and individuals. For information contact Alberto Cottica at alberto.cottica@coe.int or +33 3 9021 5983.