Do you remember the arboRise game ? On 8th February in Paris, we tested a playful approach to understanding decision-making processes in a village community. One month later, Léa Ackerer, commissioned by ETH’s ForDev, tests the game in the field, in the small village of Diaradouni and then in Manakoro, in the south of the Linko sub-prefecture.
The arboRise game is very simple: the four players receive cards representing their fields, with different degrees of fertility. They can then play their cards (cultivate their fields) in several zones, representing the types of crops: food crops (cassava, fonio, etc.), cashew nut plantations for cash, or agroforests with arboRise. Each type of crop involves specific costs and income, as in real life. And as in real life, one can choose to spread out one’s activities or “bet” everything on a single crop.
What did this experience bring out? In addition to the smiles of the players, it seems that our game is a very good awareness-raising tool, to show the impact of the choice of crops (groundnuts, cassava, cashew nuts or reforestation by arboRise) on the prosperity of the community.
A key lesson seems to be ‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket‘: resist the lure of immediate gains and continue to grow food crops even if they are less profitable.
We also observed that women play more conservatively, while men take more risks. We had also expected more collective strategies to emerge, but the players chose to focus on their own interests. This is an important lesson: in our fieldwork we will make sure that we create the conditions to strengthen the cooperation between the families involved in our project.
Playing a role-playing game implies that a few simple rules are set and that it is then the players who invent new rules as the game progresses. Such an evolution implies that the game master invites the players to seize this space of freedom. This is of course what was done on the spot, but it is possible that our interpreter got caught up in the game and did not translate Lea’s instructions as faithfully as he should have. Such are the vagaries of fieldwork.
We will obviously continue to develop and use this game as a real awareness-raising tool. For more information on the use of serious games in development: https://www.commod.org/
