PLAY TO GROW: USING GAME-BASED LEARNING FOR RURAL DEVELOPMENT
Context
India is one of the world’s largest growing economies, has the world’s third largest Internet
user-base and ranks second in agricultural output (OECD data tables). While smallholder
farmers are part of a sector excluded from this growth, with poor performance and increased
farmer suicides as a result, some argue that the future of sustainable agricultural growth and
food security in India depends on the performance of
small and marginal farmers (Dev 2012). However, despite globalised economic developments
and technological advances, small farmers remain one of the most disadvantaged groups in the
world.
Strengthening small farms is seen as crucial to achieving the United Nations Millennium
Development Goals to eradicate poverty and hunger whilst ensuring environmental
sustainability (Pandya-Lorch 2007, Hazell et al. 2007). One of the twelve targets identified to
address these goals is to make the benefits of new information and communication
technologies (ICTs) available. The gap between farmers and India’s web-connected elite is
widening as obstacles hinder the take up of new technologies and digitally mediated modes of
learning that could potentially enable social and economic resilience.
Augmenting Agriculture with Mediated Learning
Games are becoming a popular form of interactive media that integrate informational content
within games technology for educational opportunities with a range of different types of
educational content, learning principles, target audiences and platforms. The application of
game play with serious content may provide a powerful tool to promote engagement with
social issues. Existing research has found that computer games can promote empathy across
cultural divides and direct connection between players and events or narratives that take place
within the world of the game. Social impact games such as Darfur is Dying (2006), Ayiti (2006)
and ICED (2008) to name a few, draw upon these capabilities to promote social change
agendas.
Interactive digital games offer experiences and environments where it is possible to
practice skills, stimulate dialogue, and animate complex ideas, systems and problems free
from consequences of failure. This can motivate learning and innovation.
Digital gaming provides tools and platforms to leverage the power of empathy,
identification, self-connection, engagement and imagination. In doing so, social impact
games promote outreach, fundraising, civic engagement and awareness for social change
agendas such as poverty alleviation, racism or even the impact of global environmental
change on community dynamics. Research has found that computer games can promote
more direct, self-connection between players and game world events (Klimmt 2009, 251)
and identification and empathy formation across cultural divides (Bachen et al 2012).
Serious games can also offer participatory learning by employing games as social actors that
build relationships through dialogue, feedback and behaviour modelling (Stokes 2011). They
can create immersive, situated and experiential learning opportunities that facilitate
constituent training and organising.
Digital Green’s work in social impact gaming
Digital Green is a not for profit international development organisation that uses an
innovative digital platform for community engagement to improve lives of rural
communities across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The organization partners with
local public, private and civil society organizations to share knowledge on improved
agricultural practices, livelihoods, health, and nutrition, using locally produced videos and
human mediated dissemination.
Digital Green created a social game, Wonder Village, which is hosted on Facebook, to see how
their core work in the field could connect with external audiences who could learn and engage
in issues related to rural development. Through the game, players set up a simulated village
economy and have opportunities to relate with actual farmers in the field. Players are placed in
a resource-constrained setting and pursue quests like setting up small farms of paddy and
maize and supplying raw materials to farmers' markets. The game follows a "freemium" model,
which allows users to play for free and allows users to purchase virtual currency to advance
more quickly. With over 80 million users playing games on Facebook every month for an
average of 15 minutes a day, Wonder Village has the potential to be an effective awarenessbuilding and fundraising tool for the development sector.
Introducing Bumper Crop to Digital Green’s social gaming initiative
As part of the research project, Play to Grow: Augmenting Agriculture with Social Impact
Games, funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council UK, a team of UK/India academic
researchers and practitioners worked in partnership with Digital Green to design a board
game, Bumper Crop, for both physical and digital platforms, based on the experiences and
challenges of being a smallholding farmer in India. Initially, the project aimed to explore
and test the use of computer games as a storytelling tool to promote change-related
agendas.
Participatory Design and Evaluation Methodology
The Play to Grow project employed a participatory design approach, which involved
consultation with farmers and young urban adults right from the beginning of the process
of conceptualising the game and creating its narrative content. Field visits were made to
several small-scale farms around the village of Sanchi in Madhya Pradesh, where the team
met with around 40 farmers. Conversations were held with both individuals and
communities of farmers to identify problems or issues most relevant to them, and the
narratives the game might communicate. These conversations provided content for the
game. Then the core research team worked at IIT Bombay in a 5-day workshop/game jam
with the goal of creating a playable game concept that could be designed and tested within
the constraints of both our budget and the collective skills sets available, which included
expertise in improvisation, ethnography, participatory design, storytelling, visual design,
animation and human computer interaction. Early physical versions of Bumper Crop were
play-tested informally with urban young adults and game designers and improvements
were made iteratively. A digital prototype of the game is now for available for free on
Google Play store.
Initial evaluations were made of a physical prototype of the game with focus groups
including 15 young urban adults in Mumbai, Indiai, 12 farmers who were trained by Digital
Green on mediating screenings (referred to in this document as ‘mediators’) and 12 farmers
in Rajgarh, an area of Madhya Pradesh bordering Rajasthan. Given differences in levels of
literacy amongst the farmers’ focus group some parts of the evaluation were conducted via
discussion. Questionnaires combining both quantitative and qualitative methods were
employed with some shared questions between the different focus groups.
The Bumper Crop Concept
A Bumper Crop player’s objective is to complete the harvest of three crops first. Players roll
a die to move backwards or forwards on a game board. They land on spaces and complete
tasks to grow crops through a cycle of agro-food production. The design and structure of
Bumper Crop aims to simulate events in farmers’ lives as well as the agro-food production
cycle as a whole. Events like water shortage, power failure, drought, floods and family
situations like wedding and birth of a child are integrated into the game to create its own
narrative. Thus, resolving conflicts is a part of the game play together with understanding
the problems faced by an Indian farmer.
To manage the game’s complexity and to keep gameplay interesting, both the challenges
and their technical solutions were somewhat simplified compared to real life settings.
However, players are able to find out more about farming practices and experiences
referred to in the game by scanning ‘QR codes’ that appear on game cards with a QR
scanning application on a mobile device. These codes link to selected videos from the
Digital Green archive.
During the Bumper Crop design process, different game concepts and mechanisms were
explored, to include a balance of factual or serious content while engaging different
experiences of fun necessary for keeping players motivated. A game board platform was
chosen for its familiarity and opportunities it enables for: creativity through adopting roles
in the simulation of real life experiences, challenge through strategy, social and competitive
engagement with multi-player interaction, meaningful communication of issues through
content. Once a decision was made on the game mechanism, the challenge was to include
more strategy, which affords more opportunities for mastery, sense of accomplishment,
and critical thinking. Experiences of contrasting roles in the gameplay invoke significant
debates on food production in India.
Bumper Crop presented an interesting design challenge to communicate such realities and
complexities of farmers’ lives and the agro-food production system within the constraints
of 60 board spaces. The visual design of the game board and equipment was constructed to
simulate an aerial view of a field system made from real seeds, grains and textiles. These
tangible elements of farming reinforce the real world content of the game through textual
and visual storytelling.
Initial Evaluation Results
In the two weeks before meeting with mediators and farmers for the playtest in Rajgarh,
unseasonable rain and hailstorms devastated the wheat crops being harvested at that time.
Farmers elsewhere in the region were staging protests on highways in protest of delayed
relief payments and unsatisfactory crop loss surveys by the government. These were some
of the challenges the team aimed to communicate in Bumper Crop. However, asking the
mediators and farmers to play a game at such a time of crisis did raise questions about
what direct benefit such a medium could actually bring for them and how it could possibly
capture the complex issues they face daily. Nevertheless, the results surprised the research
team and opened up new possibilities for the board game developed.
While the mediators and farmers were not intended as the original target audience of the
game, the evaluation results suggested that it was effective at promoting their own
learning about agricultural practices. Furthermore, the results suggested that it may be a
useful training opportunity for mediators to engage with the Digital Green archive of videos
and to learn and practice skills in facilitating groups and modelling behaviour.
When the mediator focus group was asked whether they learnt something about farming
through Bumper Crop, seven strongly agreed, four agreed, one disagreed and one was
neutral. The mediator and farmers’ responses to the questions posed in the evaluation
tended to demonstrate the power of the game as a serious device to learn about better
agricultural practices by diversifying income, by being more strategic in planning and
preparation or by using new techniques. When asked if the game communicates something
about their lives, the mediators and farmers’ comments indicated that it was close to their
reality: ‘It relates to our life very much and all the upheavals that come into our lives’, ‘We
have to pay for weddings and we run out of money, have to borrow from people’, and ‘Our
crops are attacked by insects.’
While mediators and farmers’ strong sense of identification with the game content
motivated their game play, games also provide the opportunity for fantasy, which is
important to learning. Comments and actions made by the farmers observed during game
play suggested that they enjoyed playing with the game money. They put the money in
their shirt pockets as they would real money. One comment indicated that it was
pleasurable to have physical money to do things with. The strategic elements of the game
require the player to manage their resources and make decisions about how best to use
them to both tend their crops, but also generate further income and sustainability.
The mediators and farmers’ comments suggested that they enjoyed the game and took it
very seriously, because it strongly related to their own life. They found the game was easy
to understand.
The following mediator and farmers’ responses to questions in the evaluation about what
they learned from playing the game reiterated the game’s efficacy at promoting their own
knowledge of farming: ‘Learned what are the different things we can do for our farm with
the money that we have’; ‘I learned about the things which are needed for farming
practices’; ‘If children played from an early age, they would have a clear understanding
from the beginning of their life how to be a good farmer’; ‘Learned the right way of doing
things and do tasks after applying one's mind’. Other responses to questions regarding their
enjoyment of the game and its relevance to their lives indicated an identification with the
game world: ‘This game correlates with situation of farmers and gives us understanding
how can we move ahead in those tough circumstances’; ‘It's about my life, so I like it’; ‘It
relates to our life very much and all the upheavals that come into our lives’; ‘We have to
pay for weddings and we run out of money, have to borrow from people’; ‘Our crops are
attacked by insects’.
As experts it provided them an opportunity safe from real consequences to practice and
learn new strategies to overcome the challenges they face everyday. One particular
comment recognized the immersive experience and the impact this has on motivation:
‘While playing, I felt that it was really farming not just a game. So I took it seriously to play
well’. Another recognized how the game promotes an integration of knowledge through
doing: ‘One can learn something from this game. When you do something, only then you
can learn’.
Some spaces in the game were intentionally placed as dramatic pitfalls where a player may
be close to winning, but then has to negotiate with other players to take out loans and sell
off assets to continue playing. The social realism of these moments demotivated some
urban players’ engagement with the game, but was important for generating empathy.
However, for farmers’ their responses suggested that these narrative elements promoted a
sense of self-efficacy and perseverance in their own lives: ‘In real life if you lose something,
don't be disheartened. Do not give up, but try a better strategy’.
Conclusion
These responses to the game suggest that it does more than represent issues of poverty
and marginalization or provide instructional learning or received knowledge. While Digital
Green mediators and farmers were not intended as the initial target audience for the game,
they were considerably more immersed in the game and the learning opportunity it
afforded. In particular, their experience with the game drew upon the participatory and
immersive advantages provided by games to strategise their own lives and practice.
Digital Green already incorporates and promotes aspects of games within its video platform
with leaderboards giving information on numbers of viewings of videos and adoptions of
practices they feature. The integration of more direct game solutions could work well with
these pre-existing peer-to-peer feedback and networked learning mechanisms already
operating within the platform.
A game such as Bumper Crop could be integrated into a virtual training programme for
Digital Green mediators to provide a motivating and entertaining opportunity for them to
develop their own identification and empathy with the different challenges and life
situations that may face farmers within the communities in which they work. It could offer
them the opportunity to try out and imagine new strategies that farmers can employ to
develop their resilience. Within such a training platform, further motivational links to
Digital Green videos that correspond with specific strategies and content included within
the game, could not only give a motivation for them to engage with the video archive, but
also give a sense of how these practices fit within the wider context of agro-food
production as a whole.
Additional games could be built within the platform that spill out of and link back into
Bumper Crop to reinforce the integration of this content and augment the immersive
learning experience. For example, additional quiz games could be developed around the
content of the videos featured within the game with good scores giving players strategic
advantages within Bumper Crop. The mediators could also use the physical version of the
game as part of their own facilitation with farmer groups as an entertaining way to
promote discussion, reflection and sharing of good strategies and positive peer-to-peer
identification and feedback. Tips on how the game could be used and introduced within this
context could be introduced at its completion. Making the game open source, so that its
narrative content can be added to, changed, its equipment repurposed with new rules or
game play mechanisms, will bring further opportunities for dialogue, sharing, innovation,
and customisation to specific sociocultural contexts and even different social issues and
lived practices within fields of play.
Acknowledgements
This research forms part of the Play to Grow project (http://playtogrow.org) funded by the
UK Arts and Humanities Research Council with initial support provided by an UnBox
Fellowship for Misha Myers and Saswat Mahapatra from the AHRC, British Council and
Science & Innovation Network. We acknowledge Joshua Oliver’s contribution to the
preliminary stage of the research as one of the original UnBox Fellows and Piyush Verma’s
assistance with the production of the physical prototype of Bumper Crop. We are grateful
to ACCESS and the farmers in Madhya Pradesh for their stories and time given to
conceptualise and evaluate the game. We also acknowledge the participants who took part
in the evaluations with urban young adults and the Design students at IIT Bombay who
conducted the study: Piyush Churad, Sanket Kulkarni, Maharaj, Kaustubh Limaye, Sylvan
Lobo, Riken Patel, Prem Lokesh, Kalyani Dhone, Debasis Biswas. We acknowledge Dave
Griffiths of Kernow FoAM for his work on the project developing the digital prototype of
Bumper Crop.
i
The evaluations with urban young adults were conducted by a group of Master of Design students
as a part of the Usability Evaluation course led by Professor Anirudha Joshi at Indian Institute of
Technology Bombay.
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