Just a game? Playing in pursuit of sustainability, inclusion and justice in small-scale fisheries in the Philippines

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. Show more