Internet of Elephants founder Gautam Shah explains why games won't save nature overnight - but they can help millions of people build a lifelong relationship with the natural world.
By Mathias Gredal Nørvig
Recorded at the first international Games & SDG Summit in Nairobi, this conversation explores one of the most intriguing questions facing both the games industry and the environmental movement: can games help reconnect people with nature?
For Gautam Shah, the answer is yes - but not in the way many people imagine. After spending two decades at Accenture, he left the corporate world to combine technology, conservation and game design, founding Internet of Elephants to create digital experiences that bring people closer to wildlife. Rather than asking players to save the planet through a single game or campaign, Shah believes meaningful behaviour change happens gradually, through repeated moments of curiosity, wonder and discovery.
In my conversation with Gautam, he explains why he left a successful corporate career, how wildlife tracking data unexpectedly led him into games, and why conservation needs a fundamentally different relationship with players. He argues that guilt rarely inspires lasting action, that nature should become part of everyday play rather than an occasional campaign, and that the games industry has a unique opportunity to influence millions of people simply by making wildlife visible.
Above all, Shah believes conservation should not begin with telling people what they ought to do. It should begin by helping them rediscover something many have quietly lost: a sense of wonder about the natural world.
This interview, hosted by Mathias Gredal Nørvig, has been edited and condensed from the original Good Game Club podcast for length and clarity.
Could you introduce yourself and Internet of Elephants?
Internet of Elephants is a game studio, and it's focussed entirely on developing games about wildlife and nature with the intention of trying to engage, hopefully one day, billions of people with the topic of wildlife and nature.
Our whole goal is: how can we make people spend five minutes a day with wildlife, even if they would otherwise not have access to it where they live?
You come at this from a different angle to many people in the games industry - your passion is conservation?
Yeah, totally. Straight out of college, I worked for a large IT consulting company called Accenture. I worked for them for 20 years. But I would spend all my holiday time, all my salary that I was gaining, on wildlife vacations. That was just what I loved. I loved being with animals. I loved being in the middle of animals. I just loved those experiences. But I never had the guts to ... I didn't know anything about conservation. I didn't know anything about any of that. I just loved animals. I started to see how my tech background, my project management background, my delivery background, was useful in health, in education, in agriculture, and all these sectors that I know nothing about.
So maybe now’s the time to figure out how it could be useful in the conservation world. So, I quit. I thought, "I'm getting into wildlife conservation." I had no idea what that would mean. I decided to stay in Kenya. I was already here. It made a lot more sense than going back to my hometown of Chicago. And I figured it out from there. But games, it never even occurred to me that that might be where I would end up. I just assumed I'd be an IT director or a CIO of some conservation organisation.
How did you come across gaming?
It all came from looking at data. I was looking at all the wildlife data that was being gathered. At that time, it was mainly GPS-related data. Now there's all sorts of additional interesting data. I was just watching the movements of animals all over the world, and I was trying to predict what was going to happen or where they were going to go. In my mind I was playing this game, but I was playing this game based on real data. It was actually compelling to try and figure out what was going to happen.
I happened to be in a class with somebody who was a professor in game design. I started talking with her about it, and she said, "This is what you should do. You should figure out how to make games out of all this data." That's how it started.
Then everybody was talking about the Internet of Things and the interconnectivity between people and their refrigerators, their cars, their thermostats. I started thinking: what if people were connected with wildlife in the same way that they're connected with everything else? How would that change our relationships with nature? Looking at the data, it was a bit of an epiphany. It’s possible. The data exists. Connection happens at the individual animal level as opposed to at the species level. We have the ability to do that.
So instead of the Internet of Things, I started thinking about the Internet of Elephants, although it applies to any wildlife.
How would you describe your change model and your approach to changing behaviour or changing attitudes?
It's a long-term game. I really do think that if you think you're going to go out and make a game and change someone's behaviour from making that one game, one, it's very unlikely, and two, you're going to skew what you're doing because you've got to get that immediate outcome. And therefore, everything you'll be doing is for that short-term outcome, perhaps at the expense of a long-term shift.
We've been very explicit that behaviour change, values change, the way you vote, the way you buy - all the things that really drive conservation outcomes - they happen over the long term. You've got to be careful not to think that you're going to make one game that's going to create all the change. It's about creating waves.
If I can get you to spend five minutes a day with wildlife content - maybe it's games, maybe it's video, whatever it happens to be - that's part of your life. That's a long-term shift that will start to affect your value system and start to make you do things a little bit differently.
We've always said we've got to avoid that trap of asking, "How are you going to measure this? How is this going to save an orangutan on the ground?" A lot of it is about how much time you're spending, how much time you're engaging, what's the level of depth at which you're engaging, and how your attitudes are shifting over time from playing the game. I'm not trying to say somebody played this game and now they're not buying Nutella. I don't want to get into that trap.
I think the other thing is: what's the attitude that we're taking about the player? I do think that the conservation sector has often got this attitude of, "If only everybody cared as much as we do, the world would be a better place." I think we've taken the approach that everybody really does care.
Life is hard, right? There’s a million things going on. The way you feel about the environment, the way you feel about nature—it's not about care. It's about, "What the hell do I do? I've got 17 other things that I've got to get done as well."
So, if we can take that perspective in the way that we create the narratives, the way that we create the stories and the way that we treat the user, that's our philosophy around this.
All our games should have that attitude about our player from the very get-go.
In games, you talk about conversion points. What is the point at which people feel that their sense of belonging with nature changed?
It's tough to measure. We've had a couple of people try and do some scientific studies using our games, but it is difficult to measure. What we've found, somewhat anecdotally, is that it's actually very different depending on the person.
People say if you tell people the facts, that doesn't really move the needle and you need to tell stories. We totally believe that. But we've actually found that sometimes the facts work. Sometimes people say, "I had no idea about this." It might be some number of decline, or it might be some fact about how an animal behaves. That's the thing that stays with them.
One of the things that I think we've found a lot is that feeling of wonder. That feeling of, "This exists in the world? I didn't even know." We made a prototype of a game that had to do with animal sounds, and it was fascinating to see how people reacted. They'd say, "We didn't even know that this sound existed in the world." Here it is. Some of it is the wonder.
And then sometimes we get told it's the inspiration - not that comes from the animals, but because we also try and feature the people that work in research and the people that work in conservation. They're part of the whole story. Sometimes it's the human element of the people who have dedicated their lives to this that creates inspiration. People say, "I had no idea there were people who go out there and do this."
What is your hope, what is the message that you wish the games industry would take to heart?
I'm a huge believer in the power of games. I don't necessarily think, despite what I do, that the way this is going to shift is because we've created a new game that all of a sudden becomes the new Minecraft, or the new Fortnite. I think that needs to happen. You need to seed the market with those ideas and those possibilities.
But I think the way something really changes is when the organisations that have the power, they have the brand, they have the eyeballs, they already have the engagement, when they really commit to using that power for that outcome.
I'm not saying everybody needs to completely and totally change their game. Take the Green Game Jam, for example. We do these activations for a couple of weeks a year, and I always think, why can't that always be on? It might only be ten per cent of your game, but ten per cent of the audience that the gaming sector has is a massive influence on the public. How can we think about this being always on, always on, always on? How do we create the proof points that wildlife and animal content is something that your users and your players will value?
If they don't, I don't blame you at all for not wanting to do it. It's not your business. But I suspect it might show you something very different. As long as we're positioning it in the right way, it's not preachy, it doesn't take away from what's really great about the games, players will appreciate that type of content.
The winning proposition of Green Game Jam was you don’t have to promise efforts for a year – now we’ve been doing that for six or seven years, there could be a point in time where we say, ‘What is the next version of that?’ I think that’s a great idea.
I'll give you an example. We always wanted to create a fitness app or game where you could measure your runs against the actual runs of animals based on their GPS tracking. I could make that and it would be awesome. I would get a hundred people on it because I'd have to compete against all the other fitness apps that are out there. It will never work.
We got a little bit lucky because we created a partnership with Adidas. They had a running app with 150 million users and they said, "Let's do that, but through our app." It couldn't be everything that I wanted it to be, but we had millions of people logging their runs against a snow leopard, against a pangolin, against an elephant, against a Bengal tiger. It got written up in Runner's World.
To this day, I still think maybe one of our biggest accomplishments was that Runner's World was writing about snow leopards. That would never otherwise happen. How could you get the athlete's world involved with conservation? To me, the gaming sector has that Adidas power. You do need a few organisations that are willing to put themselves out there for it.
What do you think some of the blockers are for that?
It's not your business. I completely get it. You've got other metrics that you've got to meet. It's not yet proven that incorporating this type of content and engaging your users in this way will support the bottom line. We can have lots of talk about it, and there's lots of theory that players want that. But at the end of the day, we don't have the hard proof to tell any game company, "If you do this, not only is it good to do, but your engagement numbers will go up." How does it translate into the metrics that are used by the games sector to measure whether they're doing well or not?
It's a bit chicken and egg. If you don't have the proof point, it's very difficult to take the step.
If you don't take the step, we'll never create the proof point. It might even be that we need independent organisations to start creating the proof that makes it easier to go in and do it.
The creative desire, the general intention - I feel like it's there from the organisations that I've spoken with. I understand that it's very difficult to translate doing this into the metrics that, at the end of the day, really matter.
How do you make people see that they could do an action that could matter, and how do you inspire them to do so?
A lot of it is associated with removing an entire narrative of guilt, a narrative of shame, a narrative about a very dark future. Some of it is just getting the positivity by the removal of all the negativity.
Actions need to feel part of my normal life. If you're going to make me do something that really takes me out of my typical routine or makes it harder for me to pick up my kids at school or get dinner on the table, it's unlikely to happen. What can we do that becomes part of what my normal life would be? The change is just a change, but there's no cost associated with that change. For us, our perspective is that I want you spending a little bit of time with wildlife content, with nature content, with no expectation that there's anything you necessarily have to do.
What’s your suggestion for people who want to spend five minutes a day with nature?
Let's say you live in an urban space. There's wildlife and nature in urban locations. There's things in your backyard. There's birds that come to your balcony. It can be amazing just to keep some birdseed out on your balcony and count all the different types of bird species that come and go. Dig in the mud in your backyard and look at all the different worm species.
Wildlife doesn't have to be bears and giraffes and orang-utans and jaguars. There is a tremendous amount that exists within a five-kilometre radius of where you live. Some of it is just a matter of going and discovering it or visiting your local forest or park. The amount of real wildlife content that's being put out there - you can see it, observe it and learn from the process.
Hopefully there'll be a lot more games on this topic because I still think that's one of the best ways. It's active. It's not passive. It's something that you're doing.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Gautam Shah – ‘Connecting Millions With Nature Through Games’ - on the Good Game Club podcast here Good Game Club Podcast - YouTube.
