Panel 10.5. Using commons and cooperative games for education and science communication

This presentation will present Grassvasion, a tabletop game for 3-4 players that illustrates basic concepts around invasive grasses. The game is a form of science communication from an NSF grant studying the governance of invasive grasses in Southern Arizona. In the game (and in real life), a diverse set of actors needs to build their shared capacity to stem the invasion before the invasion overwhelms the community. The game is semi-cooperative. Different players take on different roles (a rancher, a park ranger, an activist, an analyst) with different individual objectives and different incentives to work together (or not) to stem the invasion. In this panel, I will present an overview of Grassvasion, including our motivation for developing the game, how we developed game mechanics and objectives that effectively communicate key themes in our social-ecological system, and how we plan to use the game to teach people in our community and beyond about the challenge of invasive grasses – and how to overcome those challenges.

Games are increasingly being used as intervention tools to facilitate sustainable commons management among community members. Games provide key benefits by enabling participants to experience, reflect, and experiment (Kolb and Kolb 2009). In these low-risk environments, games allow players to engage with the complexities of social-ecological systems, explore risky behaviors, and create and negotiate rules (Falk et al., 2023; Janssen et al., 2023). The resulting social learning can extend beyond the framing of the game, developing institutional capacity for sustainable commons management (Meinzen-Dick et al. 2018). While these benefits are well-documented in games used in field experiments, similar advantages may arise when games are played in classroom settings. To explore this, we played the fishing game with undergraduate students in two institutions in the United States and one institution from Canada. The fishing game simulates common-pool resource (CPR) concepts such as communication, trust, and rules through a sustainability dilemma. Student reflections from the game reveal three main findings. One, students highlight that communication, without transparency and trust, is inadequate for fostering cooperation among different groups. Second, students expressed difficulty in grappling with the dilemma of needs of the broader community versus one’s own community. Finally, with challenges in crafting institutions for cooperation, students call for increased government intervention, including more regulation and stricter punitive measures on rule violators, even while expressing distrust in the government. Overall, students gain cognitive learning from the game—understanding key concepts like communication, trust, and institutions—while grappling with real-world dilemmas of sustainable resource management. At the same time, it is unclear whether games may promote normative learning, where deeper shifts in norms and values occur. This suggests that while games may be effective at teaching CPR concepts, more research is needed to understand whether games can foster the value changes for long-term sustainable behavior.

A growing body of literature highlights the benefits of using classroom games to help students understand policy concepts. In practice, however, instructors often use games as ad-hoc activities to increase student engagement, rather than as an integrated way to consolidate student understanding of core course topics. The goal of this paper is to help instructors design and systematically integrate games into their undergraduate policy courses. Drawing on our experiences as instructors and researchers, we describe how we developed a sequence of games to help undergraduate students understand three of the core concepts in environmental policy, and how we integrated them into our undergraduate courses on environmental policy. We then provide a basic framework for instructors who are interested in designing games that illustrate core policy concepts by simulating real-world policy interactions.

Rather than a standard presentation, a brief version of a digitally-based common-pool resources fisheries game will be run, with the audience participating with their cell phones or similar devices. QR codes will be distributed around the room and scanned by participants to simulate different fisheries resources to show the audience how the game could facilitate learning in the classroom and beyond. If time allows a short debrief will be held at the end.