Just a game? Playing in pursuit of sustainability, inclusion and justice in small-scale fisheries in the Philippines
Date
2017
Authors
Cleland, Deborah
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Abstract
Humans have a fishy problem: overfishing threatens livelihoods
and food security the
world over. Attempts to address this problem through research,
education and
engagement can result in a loss of hope, a palpable sense of
being a drop in the ocean –
irrelevant and overwhelmed. What happens, then, when trying to
write a thesis about it?
A conventional thesis is a single story. I argue this is not
enough. Here, I tell five
stories, each a different perspective of my experience designing
and playing ‘ReefGame’
with stakeholders in the Philippines. ReefGame is a
computer-assisted fishing game to
explore the problem of too few fish for the humans that want to
catch them. This thesis is
an autoethnography; one that experiments with the form to show
how telling more than
one story avoids paralysis and unhelpful binary thinking when
attempting to engage
ethically with ‘fishy problems’.
The five stories are stand-alone papers, each corresponding to a
lens offered by
Valerie Brown’s knowledge cultures framework for conducting
open transdisciplinary
inquiries – individual, community, expert, organisational and
holistic. Each paper answers
a facet of the overarching question ‘did the game work, how,
for whom and why?’, using
data collected from participant observation of preparing for and
running ReefGame in
stakeholder workshops across the Philippines, under the auspices
of a philanthropically
funded ‘tool demonstration’ project.
I argue playing ReefGame was an act of hope, necessary for
personal agency in the
context of worsening environmental problems. The game stimulated
dialogue and
engagement, critical for building community knowledge, and so I
offer an empiricallyderived
and principles-based game design method that others can follow.
My empirical
analysis of gaming decisions complements standard ways of
examining fisher behaviour,
particularly for understanding contextual and non-economic
drivers for livelihood
choices. As stakeholder workshops are an organisational staple,
analysing participants’
micro-interactions in the game offers insights for making
workshops more inclusive.
Finally, a holistic lens means examining the broader enterprise
of scholarly
production, and producing scholars. A diffractive comparison
between my research career
and the fishers’ livelihoods in current capitalism almost
strips us of the hope with which I
began. Nevertheless, I make a stake for collective, creative
activism as the hopeful
recommended ‘next step’, concluding that integrating diverse
ways of acting, both within
and outside academia, is the best path for engaging ethically
with fishy problems.
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Thesis (PhD)
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